Ask most Canadian claims professionals what scares them most and you’ll hear the same three contenders: a single, massive catastrophe event; a drumbeat of frequent disasters; or a string of mid‑size losses scattered across the map.
Greg Smith (pictured), president of Crawford & Company (Canada), has dealt with all three. In his view, none is easier – they simply test different parts of the industry’s machinery.
On paper, a single large loss looks like the cleanest problem: one site, one client, one set of stakeholders. In practice, the intensity can be overwhelming.
Smith points to a wildfire loss Crawford handled at a hospital years ago as an example of what a pure severity event feels like on the ground. Smoke damage had reached “every floor, in every corner and every cabinet.” The hospital couldn’t reopen until every nook was remediated – and the entire town couldn’t reopen until the hospital did.
“There is Crawford’s adjuster with the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Smith recalled, working alongside a team of adjusters and restoration providers.
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Those cases demand deep technical expertise, strong project management and a genuinely team‑based approach. The small saving grace is that, because they are relatively rare, firms can “really pour in the expertise and the resource and take an all‑hands‑on‑deck approach” to stay ahead of the loss, Smith said.
In other words, severe events become a concentration problem: intense pressure, but also intense focus and the ability to saturate the file with senior talent.
Shift to a high‑frequency scenario – hundreds or thousands of claims from a single region‑wide event – and the shape of the challenge changes completely. Local capacity is the first thing to snap.
“You have a number of events in one area,” Smith said. “That creates a lot of strain [on] your local workforce, whether it’s loss adjusters or restoration contractors or engineers.” Very quickly, firms have to start “bringing people in from out of the territory to support it.”
The upside is that once those external teams arrive, scale starts to work for you. Catastrophe bunkers, temporary offices and shared infrastructure can be set up; workflows can be industrialized; supervision, quality control and data capture can be centralized.
“When you do finally mobilize resources and bring them in, you benefit from some significant economies of scale,” Smith noted. You can “stand up a highly efficient production and operation” to work through the surge.
There is also a behavioural advantage: when a major catastrophe is dominating local news, policyholders understand that everyone is under pressure. Expectations adjust. Smith said the general public tends to recognize what is happening and “there’s a tremendous amount of gratitude that the insurance industry is stepping up and doing everything it can.” People are often “a little bit more patient and giving us a little bit more grace” as claims are processed, he said.
It’s when mid‑size events start popping up in different pockets of the country that the job can become most grinding. From a pure severity standpoint, these events may look manageable. From an operational standpoint, they can be the hardest to run.
“Very quickly, you need to start to manage the logistics of no longer having the economy of scale of one central claims handling facility,” Smith said. Instead of one big command centre, teams are split across multiple regions, each with its own weather, infrastructure and vendor challenges.
In those situations, some of the same tools that make large‑scale cat response efficient – centralized intake, shared back‑office functions, standardized workflows – are still useful. But the constant juggling of people and files can erode those efficiencies.
“You’re then dividing your forces across different geographies,” Smith said, whether by sending people on site or managing remotely. The benefit is having local resources in each centre who can “stand up a response and be able to deliver the service.” The trade‑off is permanent balancing: “you’re always balancing resources between those centers, and you’re making sure that you’ve got enough people enroute for each area.”
Public perception is also different. When a single, overwhelming event hits a city or region, everyone can see and feel it; patience tends to follow. When three or four smaller events are scattered across provinces, each community only sees its own problem.
“The consumer understanding and impact is probably not as graceful as it would be with a single large event,” Smith said. People in one town understandably have “less understanding and less patience for the fact that there are three other events, potentially in three other provinces across the country.” Their focus is narrower: “When do I get my home back? When can I reopen my business? Or when can I get my car?”
Smith is reluctant to crown any of the three scenarios as the “worst” from a claims perspective. Each one, he argued, exposes different weaknesses and demands a different playbook – from deep subject‑matter expertise and political sensitivity on a single critical facility, to surge staffing and industrialized processing in a regional catastrophe, to relentless logistics and expectation management when multiple mid‑size events hit at once.
“It’s probably a long‑winded way of saying, you know, none of them are good,” he said. “But all of them are different in the sense that you just need to have a really good strategy and a really good logistics plan to tackle each and every one of them.”
