Facing Spain’s deadliest flash floods in 50 years
2 min
“Spain has never seen a climate-related disaster like it.”— Arturo Lopez Linares
A Story by Arturo Lopez Linares, Chief Claims Officer, AXA Spain
Spain has experienced natural disasters before, but what happened in Valencia in 2024 was on a different scale. I was driving to work very early the morning after the floods when I started to get lots of messages coming in. My phone was beeping non-stop. There were already reports of deaths. By 8:30 a.m. we had called a crisis committee to ensure a global response to the emergency.
“We need to look ahead and think about how the insurance industry will respond to climate disasters like this.”
The level of destruction was immense – more than 120,000 cars were totally lost; houses were destroyed, and 224 people died. We had 230,000 claims in total, with 90 % of them made in a matter of hours. In Spain the insurance sector works differently to elsewhere in Europe.
Floods are considered an extraordinary risk and so are insured by the insurance Compensation Consortium, a Spanish public body. The consortium’s main function is to compensate damage caused by extraordinary risks that are not covered by private insurance. Because of the scale of the disaster, we had to set up a new IT system so that we could feed our assessments and reports directly into the consortium’s database so that payouts could happen more quickly.
That was just one of the changes we made. In the first weekend, we had a 500 % increase in incoming calls, and our team was amazing. We had people offering to come in and work extra hours or on their days off. There were people in other departments ringing me to ask what they could do to help us out. We also set up a psychological support helpline for our customers and gave extra training to our claims handlers to help them with the psychological aspect. I’m really proud of how we responded. At a time like that, it’s satisfying to work at AXA and to know that you have a tangible purpose.
Almost three months after the disaster, we are still working through claims, but we’ve already assessed 90 % of all of the cases. Every day we are sending new orders for compensation.
We need to look ahead and think about how the insurance industry will respond to climate disasters like this. I think that’s quite an AXA mentality – to think about what lessons we have learnt from this crisis and what we can do better next time. Because climate disasters like this will happen again, unfortunately.
