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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't hail as widely as it rains (at least in the Dallas area). It tends to dump hail across a couple neighborhoods per storm, while the rain my fall across all of Dallas and Fort Worth (hundreds of square miles).

Even withing the areas where hail falls, most of it won't be the giant hailstones. Once it gets below the size of a quarter cars and roofs are generally safe.

But yes, it regularly totals cars and destroys roofs. They'll send out an army of adjusters and roofers will swarm the area looking for work.

Don't be an insurance company specializing in just one city in Texas or you can be wiped out in one storm.

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Can confirm. I happen to live in one of the affected neighborhoods. From my experience in TX, roofs do really well with up to ping pong sized hail. Anything bigger and you have a problem.

It’s absolutely mind blowing to me how many people have their garage packed with “stuff and junk” and park outside. And then they end up strapping mattresses on their cars with duct tape.

I really want solar panels but it just doesn’t seem to make sense here. This is the 2nd time we’re having roof replaced in 10 years. A few houses have panels on their roofs and about 30% panels seem to have damage visible from the street.

This is going to sound hacky, but would a screen of 1" chicken wire mounted several inches above the panel (the stuff stretches) make for some cheap insurance? The wire is thin enough that it shouldn't interfere significantly with the amount of light the panel gets.

Chicken wire isn't very strong: the hail would probably just rip it apart.

> Don't be an insurance company specializing in just one city in Texas or you can be wiped out in one storm.

I assume this would be standard practice (diversify across regions and types of insurance) for any insurance provider, right?

Ideally. But if you start up a company in Texas, and you make marketing and sale inroads in a single big city at a much faster rate, you have a problem.

It's a bit easier in Texas with multiple large cities. But if your marketing and sales take off in one region, you can find yourself vulnerable to a single hurricane hitting the coast, for instance.

Since insurance is so heavily state regulated, if you are limited to your one state that has one big city, you may have that risk no matter what. Bigger companies can span multiple states, of course. Smaller companies will have to have their portfolio underwritten by another insurance company.

This kind of dynamic brings home how screwed small landlocked countries are (unless they're part of something like the Eurozone). And conversely, how amazingly lucky I am to have been born in the US.

Generally you reinsure yourself with other insurance companies, so that if you get more than a certain amount of loss in a single year, other insurance companies cover the extra. This risk can be spread between several reinsurance providers, taking a percentage each.

Lloyds of London is a marketplace where a lot of insurance companies reinsure with each other, or with "syndicates" which are groups of investors.

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