Cold Man Winter strikes water pipes; insurers deluged

NBC News

Kelly Harry and Steve James NBC News Contributors

8 hours ago

Jim Mone / AP

Plumber Nate Petersen prepares a pump to shoot water into the incoming city water line, left pipe, that has been frozen at a south Minneapolis home. Roto Rooter was been inundated with calls since the cold snap and regular work has been put on hold because of burst pipes and even frozen sewer lines, according to plumbing manager Paul Teale.

A home in Brooklyn, N.Y., got colder and colder even as the owners turned up the heat, while a house in Paducah, Ky., had an inch of water in four rooms. They were both victims of water pipes that cracked in the deep freeze that has much of the nation in its icy grip.
America's largest insurance company, State Farm, says it has had so many claims for frozen pipes — 28,000 in the Jan. 4-9 period of extreme cold — that it declared the situation a "catastrophe," allowing it to bring in more adjusters to handle the overload. It said the payout for such claims can be as high as $15,000.
The American Insurance Association says 22 percent of all claims on home owner's policies — 1 in 5 — are for cold weather damage, and its member companies pay out around $1.4 billion per year.
"We anticipate a large spike in frozen pipe claims," said Peter Foley, the AIA's vice president for claims. "In Washington, D.C., some of my colleagues have already had them in their own homes."
Foley told NBC News that the problem with broken pipes is that very often you don't notice them until the weather warms up and the ice thaws.
"The thing is, we are getting extreme cold temperatures in parts of the country where houses are not built to withstand it," said Foley, whose own house in New Hampshire has water pipes under the floorboards, rather than running along exposed exterior walls.
Ilene Sacco, a homeowner in Brooklyn, can count herself lucky, even though she had to call out the plumber after she and her husband noticed is was getting a little bit cold, even when they turned up the radiators.
“Two pipes froze in the garage and one in the baseboard down the wall,” she said. “The one in the garage actually cracked ... they had to cut out a piece and replace it."
What saved her from more expensive damage was the fact that it stayed so cold outside. "There had been a chunk of ice in there. If it had melted, the water would have been all over the place.”

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