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Naive question: what portion of this would be covered by insurance?
by givehimagun 13y ago
Naive question: what portion of this would be covered by insurance?
- giarc 13y agoI think it is too early to start a campaign to raise funds. They first need to meet with their insurance provider to find out what is covered and what is not, then go to the public for funding. Unless they were grossly under insured and knew it, 1 day isn't enough time to determine what's covered.
- Arelius 13y agoWorst case, they get money that they didn't need for the repairs. And they put it to good use doing one of the many other things this super valuable (IMO) non-profit does. They are after all a non-profit.
- giarc 13y agoTrue. But some people may feel cheated if they donated for a very specific reason and find out they were fully covered by insurance.
- nathanb 13y agoI must be naive too, then, because this is what I thought at first. Anything that gets dollars into the hands of the archive.org folks is fine with me, but this is what insurance policies are for.
- poopsintub 13y agoDo they even own the place, it looks like it's probably rented. How much will it cost to replace a desk and a computer?
- jlgreco 13y agoApparently they lost scanning equipment.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoThe article's only five paragraphs; maybe you could try reading it? "High-end digitizing equipment" isn't cheap. Just one big archival scanner can run $5000-$10,000 or more, and they had quite a few of those, probably specialized/customized.
- noselasd 13y agoInsurance probably cover the material loss. But often not the time to rebuild, reconfigure, re-layout, re-do, set-up, test every new item you get back. You might even have custom built, one-off pieces which will take even more effort to replace with whatever replacement gadget you get.
- xvolter 13y agoI was wondering this too. Won't they get back most of their loss from the insurance policy? Unless the fire was not covered due to a specific cause.
- dnautics 13y agoThere will almost certainly be costs not covered by insurance.
- nathanb 13y agoCare to elaborate? Unless they are underinsured or did a poor job of estimating the value of their equipment, I don't understand why you are asserting that insurance wouldn't cover all losses. That's sort of what insurance is there for.
- dnautics 13y agoinsurance is there to cover specific losses, not all losses. Opportunity costs, for example. Perhaps there will be extra labor involved in the recovery effort, this can go towards that. In any case, it's somewhat moot, since a donor who is donating in the wake of this most likely doesn't mind if spillover from recovery costs goes into the program in general.
- nathanb 13y agoI'm not sure what opportunity cost there would be, considering that their digitizing operations are not revenue-generating. But I can see your general point, that even if all the physical repairs and goods are paid for by insurance there could still be some residual costs to be absorbed.
- lambda 13y agoI would guess a good portion of it, though not all, but that will probably take some time. As a non-profit that provides a widely used web service, they could probably always use more cash, so it's better to get donations now rather than waiting for their insurance to pay out. It's possible they were underinsured on some of this stuff; since they had a lot of custom hardware for scanning books, it may have been hard to price it accurately. It can also be a good fundraising call to arms; people who may have been on the fence or said "well, maybe I'll donate later" now have a reason to donate immediately.