home owners insurance

For wind insurance only on a 1500sf concrete house (not including contents), with accordion hurricane shutters, not on a beach, I pay $1000/month (and compared to friends I have a good deal.)

On STT I'm in a condo & my portion of insurance runs me about $200.00/month on an approximately 1000-1100, 2 BR/2BA with concrete roof, hurricane shutters not on a beach. That's for all insurance not including personal possessions.

liability/fire is about 1100 for my house a year. I'm on the beach. And I gave up on wind insurance. I'll take my chances.

Billd

Insurance is much higher than on the mainland. It will absolutely shock you. In 2005, I was quoted, only checked one company, $10K for a 4000 sq ft house. It only cost $250K, turns out it was in a undesirable area, anywhere else on the island it would have been a $500K price. But they said that they charged by replacement cost, not what I would have paid for the house.Don't know about mainland rates in places where Hurricanes are a problem.
You can reduce you rate by NOT having wind (hurricane) coverage, or by not having paint replacement coverage. I didn't ever think about it, but in a hurricane, it's I'm told, like having your house sandblasted. It can strip the paint off.
If you pay $400K for a house, you may only need $250K worth of insurance. The land is not going to blow away:D
Many people who don't have a mortgage, self insure for the wind damage / flood insurance. They just sock away the $10K a year in savings until they feel they have enough to cover a major storm. Of course if you have a mirage, you can't do this.

My annual bill is 2.84% of my property. Per my mortgage company I had to get wind which I would have gotten anyway, and earthquake (even though it doesn't make any geological sense on STX) I also have replacement cost covering the majority of the larger items inside the home. It runs about $700/month. I try to justify in my mind because property taxes are so low here.

Remember for contents its very expensive. The insurnace these people are talking about are for the house not the contents. Your looking a couple of grand to insure about 50k worth of stuff.

to AllMashUp

It does make geologic sense to have earthquake insurance on STX. We are in a very active seismic zone and there was a 7.5 earthquake in 1867. Here is a link to a site documenting other earthquakes in this area: http://redsismica.uprm.edu/english/Info/sisnotas_sig.php

to AllMashUp

It does make geologic sense to have earthquake insurance on STX. We are in a very active seismic zone and there was a 7.5 earthquake in 1867. Here is a link to a site documenting other earthquakes in this area: http://redsismica.uprm.edu/english/Info/sisnotas_sig.php

But it's not, let me explain, earthquake insurance is written specifically for structural damage from the acceleration of the ground due to an earthquake. The acceleration may result from gravity in the form of a slump or landslide triggered by an earthquake, or horizontal ground acceleration from the earthquake itself. When considering the risk of damage within an active seismic zone, which I concede we are located it, you have to look at three things....what is the probability of an earthquake with a sufficeint peak ground acceleration to cause damage occuring while you own the building, how will the underlying substrate of you home respond to this acceleration, how will the construction of your builidng respond to the movement of the substrate.

St. Croix is located on the carribean microplate south of the transform bounary that seperates us from the Atlantic plate. Yes we are in a very active seismic zone..the key is that is very active...meaning we have many minor earthquakes along this plate boundary which relieve any accumulated stress due to the relative plate motion. When a portion of the boundray, say the Anegada fault that you alluded to, accumulates stress over a long period of inactivity it can fail catastophically and produce a large magnitude eathquake such as th 1867 event, but magnitude, a measurment of energy released at the focus of the rupture, does not correlate directly to peak ground acceleration.

Most structural damage we see on TV occurs when horizontal ground motion exceeds 0.1 g's or ~3.2 ft/sec squared. The probability of that occuring on STX has been modeled to occur about once every hundred years...so that is step one. Every year there is a one in one hundred chance that an earthquake of sufficient magnitude will occur to generate horizontal motions that you could cause some damage IF the other following conditions are met.

You build your house on a cliff...will it fall down during an earthquake? Well that depends alot on whether the cliff will fall down beneath it, if the cliffs is made of weak sedimentary rock or unconsolidted sediment like say Beverly Hills then yes the cliff will fall down and so too your house. STX does not have thick packages of terrestrial sediments, our bedrock is relatively close to the surface and therefor you don't have to worry about amplification of ground motion through weak sediments like those in Cali do. Nor do you have to worry about liquefaction of marine sediment like what occured in Anchorage during the Good Friday earthquake of '64 when the ground turned to pudding and flowed into the sea. You also don't have to worry about of deforested, rain saturated, tropical soils which cause landslides in Costa Rica everytime some farmer hiccups.

Lastly we dont build very tall buildings, and the little homes we do build are made of concrete. Memphis TN has a slilghtly less chance of experiencing an earthquake of significant magnitude than we do...about once every 200 hundred years...do to the fascinating New Madrid seismic zone. But the potential for damage is greater than here due to the size of their buildings and the construction material. When the land under Memphis shakes...the taller buildings will amplify the motion and a whole lot of shakin wil be goin on.

As a side note the 1867 event that you mentioned before was a major earthquake...but it would have never made the history books if it wasn't for the tsunami that it generated which caused extensive damage...not the shaking...and the insurance compaines would classify that as flood damage not earthquake damage...just like all those poor folks in New Orleans whoes roofs were lost due to wind prior to the storm surge, it didn't matter it was all still flood damage.

hey AllMashUp
That's very interesting info, thanks! I still think it's possible that earthquakes could cause property damage on STX, depending on where the earthquake occurs, and at what depth. I found this info http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/world/events/1867_11_18.php which states there was property damage from the earthquake itself: "This quake caused damage in numerous buildings on the Island, especially in the eastern zone" I'm also searching for an account that I think I read somewhere, written by Alexander Hamilton (or maybe it was someone else) about how horrible the earthquake was and the damage sustained from it.

Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton long before the 1867 earthquake. Some of Hamiltons writings do talk of the hurricanes in STX while he was there.