The Caribbean experiences 800 earthquakes per year on average, so it's important to include them in your disaster planning. They happen with little to no warning, so you need to be ready to respond quickly.
To understand your coverage for earthquakes and other natural disasters, review your insurance policies and reach out to your Gallagher broker with questions.
Earthquakes are natural ground motions caused by the sudden release of energy along faults. The earthquake's energy comes from the stresses of plate tectonics. As the plates move, the rocks on their edges become deformed and are strained until the weakest point, a fault, ruptures and releases the strain. An earthquake's size can be measured by the amount of energy released in that movement.
Since the Richter magnitude scale was first developed in 1935, it's been adopted globally for expressing the strength of earthquakes. It's a base-10 logarithmic scale — each order of magnitude is 10 times stronger than the previous one. So an earthquake that measures seven on the Richter scale is 10 times stronger than one that measures six.
