NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The environmental liability team at specialist insurer Beazley is targeting rapid growth in 2016 after seeing strong demand for fixed site pollution coverage in the past year.
Beazley's environmental team was established in 2009 and grew rapidly during the course of 2015, more than doubling in size. The arrival of new underwriters Samantha Runyon and Caitlin Patten takes the team's strength in the US to 10 underwriters effective January 1st, 2016.
"We have seen the strongest demand for our fixed site coverage," said Jayne Cunningham, environmental focus group leader at Beazley. "That is partly driven by the recovering US economy and the increasing number of brownfield remediation projects requiring coverage. But the breadth of our underwriting appetite has also made Beazley a very attractive market for brokers."
Beazley will consider risks ranging in size from single-site habitational, commercial and retail locations to scheduled portfolios of industrial, treatment, storage and disposal facilities and petroleum bulk storage facilities, with limits of up to $25,000,000.
Caitlin Patten and Samantha Runyon will be based in Beazley's Los Angeles office, offering brokers in the southwestern United States access to the environmental underwriting expertise already available in Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Ms Patten joins Beazley from AIG where she managed a team of five underwriters focusing on environmental business in the Pacific Southwest region. Ms Runyon joins Beazley from Marsh, were she was a client advisor and managed the Pacific South Region focusing on environmental risks.
In addition to its fixed site policy, Beazley provides operational coverage to businesses that may face claims for polluting the premises of third parties, as well as professional liability coverage for environmental consultants. Environmental consulting is frequently an important specialism of the engineering design firms that Beazley has been insuring since 1986. Today Beazley counts more than half of the top 50 US design firms (and eight of the top 10 firms), as ranked by Engineering News-Record, among its clients.