Eastern Iowa Farmer Spring 2021

mother nature
“We got more claims in one day than we’ve
ever had in one day in the history of the company,
and that’s 142 years,” Schmidt said of
the policyholder-owned company with almost
1,800 clients in 10 Eastern Iowa counties,
including Cedar, Clinton, Dubuque, Jackson
and Jones.
To put the derecho’s impact into context, for
the entirety of 2016 to 2019 American Mutual
paid a total of 548 claims that totaled $3.8
million.
As calls poured in from frazzled customers,
Schmidt and his eight employees jumped into
action with their disaster plan. Everyone, no
matter what their job, took phone calls, and
did things the old-fashioned way – filling out a
paper form with the caller’s name, location, and
damage sustained and assigning a priority level
based on that damage.
“Luckily, we had implemented a plan earlier
in the year for COVID for people to work
remotely, so five of the eight employees had
laptops,” he said. They were able to charge two
laptops at a time because that’s all the generator
could handle in addition to the server and the
phones.
Most of the firm’s outside agents were impacted
by the storm as well and were without
power and couldn’t be reached by clients for
a time. Those calls came to the Grand Mound
office too.
Then it was a matter of entering the claims
into the system and assigning them to adjusters.
“We had one full-time claims adjuster in the
office, and there was no way he could handle
this many claims,” Schmidt said, adding that
one adjuster might take months to handle 100
claims. An agent in the office with 18 years
past experience as an adjuster was reassigned
job duties, and third-party adjusters also were
hired.
“You can’t staff for a once-in-a-lifetime
event and that is exactly what we were facing,”
he said, adding that he and his staff appreciate
the patience of their customers.
“There simply was not enough adjusters in
the United States to handle all the disasters
going on at the same time,” he said, noting that
hurricanes in the south and wildfires in the west
contributed to the stress on the supply-and-demand
chain across the nation.
Besides a shortage of adjusters, materials and
contractors also were scarce as farmers faced
heading into the colder months with temporary
“We got more
claims in one day
than we’ve ever
had in one day in
the history of the
company, and
that’s 142 years.”
— Mark Schmidt
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eifarmer.com spring 2021 | Eastern Iowa Farmer 89