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Five Steps to Take After an Accident

If you're ever in an accident, it's easy to forget what to do right away. Follow these five steps to ensure the safety of you, your passengers and everyone else involved:

  1. Call the Police. Even for small accidents, call 911. Police will help redirect traffic and document the incident.
  2. Avoid Additional Damage. Move your car from the roadway as soon as possible to prevent additional collisions.
  3. Get the Right Information for the Insurance Process. You'll need the other driver's name, license, phone number, insurance information and license plate number.
  4. Document the Accident. From taking pictures of the damage and the overall accident to interviewing witnesses and taking down their information. The more accident evidence you can gather for the insurance claim, the better.
  5. File an Accident Report. File a state vehicle accident report (available at police stations and DMV websites) to help speed up the claims process.

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It is very important that your insurance coverage reflect your personal driving style and fit within your budget. Together we can determine what insurance plan works best for you.

 

Tornado Truths

 

Tornado truths that can help you stay safe

 

Tornadoes have caused severe and irreparable damage to tens of thousands of Americans and their property in recent years. On top of the physical and emotional fallout, many have also lost their lives as a direct result of a tornado.

 

Although you can never control the weather or the outcome of a destructive storm, there are steps you can take to help you and your family remain protected in the event of a tornado. Those steps of action begin with knowing fact from myth.

 

Here are a few tornado truths that could help keep you and those you love safe:

 

  • When indoors, shut all windows and doors. Do not leave them open in an attempt to follow the mythical need to “pressurize” your home because the result would more likely be debris flying through the window and causing severe harm, or wind pressure working to lift the roof off the house from the inside.

     

  • If you are inside your home or other structure, retreat to the lowest level (a basement is ideal) or the room closest to the middle of the home or farthest from windows and doors. Do not seek a “corner” of the structure for your retreat; instead, go to the center-most point, away from windows and anything heavy that could fall on your head.

     

  • If you’re outdoors, find the lowest spot, such as a ditch or dry river bed, and lie flat on your stomach, covering the back of your head with your hands.  Do not follow the myth of seeking shelter underneath a bridge or overpass because it could collapse on top of you or large debris and winds could come rushing underneath and potentially sweep you up into the tornado itself.

 

  • If you are in a vehicle, abandon the vehicle and try to find shelter in a structure or outdoors in a low place where you should lay stomach-down and cover the back of your head with your hands. Most importantly, do not attempt to drive away from the storm unless it’s very obviously far away and moving in the opposite direction. 

 

  • Do not take shelter near a road or foothill and expect the tornado to miss you. Some myths say that tornadoes will reverse their directions when nearing a road or foothill, but a tornado doesn’t discriminate and will keep on its path.

 

  • Keep head gear handy. Head protection can be the number-one most important factor in remaining protected from flying debris—indoors or outdoors—so know where bike, football, batting, boxing and other helmets are in the house, and make them easily accessible.

 

At The Edwards Agency, we want to help you know the tornado truths that will help keep you and your family safe. For more tornado safety tips, visit the Storm Prediction Center’s comprehensive guide at http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/safety.html.

 

Contact Us!

 

At The Edwards Agency, we can work with you to make sure you've got the coverage you need, while at the same time using all possible credits and discounts to make that coverage affordable. Just give us a call at our Sumiton at (205)648-2830 or Jasper at (205)295-2030 or send us a note at sales@edwardsagency.com. We want to help you meet your goals, and make sure what's important to you is protected!

 

Content provided by Safeco Insurance