Firefighters, fire – illustrative photo.
Prague – In 2022, firefighters went to about 21,000 fires with total damage of around 5.3 billion crowns. A quarter was insured. This follows from the analysis of the Czech Association of Insurance Companies. According to her, the Czechs lost 1.7 billion crowns due to uninsured fires.
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In the Czech Republic last year, there were 5,307 insured fire events with a total insured loss of 3.6 billion crowns, another 15,500 fires for 1.7 billion crowns were not insured.
According to the current analysis, the 'over-insurance' in case of fire reaches about 25 percent, but according to other data it is more, said the analyst of the association, Petr Jedlička. “According to various statistics, property insurance for citizens reaches 55 percent, for companies it will be even significantly more. The reason for this difference is the large number of fires in which firefighters intervene, but no major damage occurs. Typically, these can be fires, grass, waste or other alarms, where there is no real damage or only minimal damage,” he said. According to the association, an average of 14.5 property insurance claims occur every day, the cause of which is fire.
In a year-on-year comparison, the volume of claims increased, and while the number of insured events remained stable, so did the average amount of fire claims, by 13 percent. In the long term, the number of insured fires is around 5,300 events per year with an average loss of 676,000 crowns in 2022 compared to 595,000 crowns in 2021. the association's non-life insurance expert Lenka Slabejová. According to her, people should therefore pay attention to the correct amount of insurance sums, so that their insurance does not remain below the real value of the property. “However, only a third of insurance contracts reach the correct insurance amount,” she said. According to her, so-called underinsurance is most often between 20 and 49 percent, and 15 percent of contracts have more than 50 percent underinsurance.
Fires were among the first events against which could be insured. The first attempts at this type of insurance date back to the middle of the 17th century. In 1681, economist Nicholas Barbon and his colleagues founded the first insurance company against fires, The Insurance Office for Houses. Fire insurance was first available in Czech territory in 1748 , when the Teresian reforms created a so-called fund to cover damages caused by fires, floods and bad weather.
