Becoming the Master of Disaster

A meeting on Monday in Washington of federal officials involved in the Northridge quake relief produced two very useful ideas. One is that the widely praised federal effort will need to be even better next time. And the other is that the cost of disaster insurance is too onerous to be left to individuals or even to individual states but must be organized in the form of mandatory federal disaster insurance.

The multi-agency meeting and self-evaluation, attended by such disaster doyens as James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Henry G. Cisneros, the housing secretary and Federico Pena, the transportation secretary, did not bog down in an orgy of self-satisfaction. Indeed, despite its successes, the relief program, officials agreed, was plagued by too much confusion and too many errors. “This was a great experience,” said one official. “But the Big One scares the bejesus out of us.”

That helpful lack of smugness was reflected in the officials’ keen sense that a national disaster-relief insurance fund is urgently needed. The time has come for Congress to take a hard look at making disaster insurance, be it flood, hurricane, earthquake or whatever, mandatory for the nation’s property owners. Government simply doesn’t have the resources to compensate all disaster-produced property losses. And only if the risks are spread widely can the premium for basic, meat-and-potatoes coverage be kept so low that it can be required of individuals.

The Monday meeting was a useful reminder that the effort to create such a national insurance fund needs to be mounted now. The memory of the Jan. 17 quake is fresh enough that the idea should still engage the attention of the entire California delegation. The vicious tornado in Texas on Monday should arouse that state’s representatives to action. Each month seems to bring some fresh rebuke from Mother Nature. The only way not to leave ordinary Americans in the financial lurch is to create some sort of natural-disaster protection act that would assist states in adopting stiffer building codes, give private insurance companies some incentives to make quakes and other perils more insurable and require basic natural-disaster insurance coverage.