For insurance companies, protecting storm-damaged homes from rain can save billions of dollars in additional claims for walls, floors and furnishings destroyed by water.
It is a powerful incentive that is now pushing insurers to make new arrangements for quick, temporary covering of storm-damaged homes, and even to adopt new technology and materials.
An entrepreneur who hopes to capitalize on the impulse is Anthony Seraphin, the 49-year-old president of Global Wrap and Services, a nine-month-old company based in Chalfont, Pa.
Mr. Seraphin, it seems, is a shrink-wrap specialist, having started out in 1981 wrapping small pleasure boats for winter storage.
He moved on to building small temporary shelters for storage or protection from the elements, and wrapping larger, more irregularly shaped objects like moth-balled military aircraft and new industrial equipment that needed protection in transit.
Now, in starting Global Wrap and Services, Mr. Seraphin wants to apply his techniques to wrapping houses -- from chimneys and dormer windows down to the foundation.
Rather than soliciting individual homeowners, he is trying to reach large numbers by arranging with their insurance companies to provide his services after natural disasters.
"For a while, I was getting nowhere with the insurance companies," Mr. Seraphin said. "But now, several are talking like they are real interested."
The first big contract could come in Florida, where the state insurance department is pushing companies to cooperate with one another and make advance arrangements with contractors to handle temporary repairs of any home damaged by a hurricane, regardless of the home owner's insurance company.
"Global Wrap could be the perfect kind of partner for us and could have responsibility for handling several neighborhoods," said Marty Urra, chief executive of Smart, a Miami disaster-services company selected by Florida officials to coordinate disaster responses of insurance companies, contractors and the Federal and local governments.
Although Mr. Seraphin's techniques cost more than the standard practices of boarding up windows and covering roofs with tarpaulins, Mr. Urra said the higher protection from wrapping a house could appeal to wealthier homeowners.
Because Mr. Seraphin uses sheets of plastic seven-thousandths of an inch thick, or four times the thickness or ordinary household trash bags, it is far stronger than the thinner plastic sheets typically sold in the neighborhood hardware store.
The thick plastic, which he buys in 32-foot-wide rolls from various suppliers, does not include recycled materials, which Mr. Seraphin says makes it less likely to tear or rip. Buckles and cables are used to attach the plastic to a home, and then a hand-held flame thrower is used to shrink the plastic wrap and make it as taut as a drum.
Insurance companies have long had contigency plans for disasters, with warehouses full of cots, stepladders and cellular phones, plus emergency procedures to summon hundreds of claims adjusters to a disaster scene.
Tony Seraphin