While you may well expect an earthquake in Los Angeles or Haiti and, as such, you'd be in a rush to insure your building, if you own it, maybe you'd not be as eager to insure your building against floods, if it is placed in an area where traditionally they don't take place. But even if Al Gore with his movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' hasn't succeeded to convince you as regards global warming, climate changes have become pretty obvious for everyone, so it's hard to dismiss them. Catastrophic floods have been witnessed in places where they don't usually happen, like in France or Germany.
And besides, they don't have to be natural, a banal water leak may lead to the flooding of your entire building, and, if it has as catastrophic an impact, what does it matter if the flooding is natural or accidental? After all, insurances are meant for effects, not for causes.
As regards fires, it works pretty much in the same way. While entire forests may get on fire, like in Portugal, for instance, in urban areas, fires are rather accidental than natural, being due to short-circuits, electrical appliances left unmonitored, wire defects or simply human errors. But exactly as you don't want to see your building transforming into a pile of rubble and mud, you don't want to see it reduced to a pile of ashes. So given that fires and flooding are so likely to happen, fire and flood insurances are proportionally common.
Even if they might not endanger the building itself, being rather local, for your business, the contents or stock may be as vital and their destruction as catastrophic. While arguably the IT hardware is by no means as expensive as the said building, if you are an IT company and your very activity hangs on the said hardware, then it is priceless for you, regardless of the actual price of the physical object. On the same lines, if you are a restaurant owner, your old French wines and the rare truffles for which your establishment is sought by important customers may be for you worth an entire building because, if you lose the custom, you will lose your business. As such, you have to insure your building, contents and stock at least against the most frequent enemies - fire and water.
Even so, if you don't have professional indemnity insurance and your customers get directly affected while on your premises, you may lose everything by being sued afterward, even if your contents and stock remain intact.
As a professional firm or practice you will need professional indemnity insurance often as a mandatory requirement of your institute, your client and to protect yourself and your business.
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