High risks associated with the likelihood of fires, flooding and damage to property resulting from riots make insurance coverage costly for businesses trading in the city.
In some cases the risks might even be considered sufficiently great to cause some insurance companies to decline to provide coverage.
The local fire department has continually pointed to the long-standing existence of what one official told Stabroek Business was a “cocktail for crisis” – that is, old, often rotting wooden buildings packed with combustible consumer goods and boasting fragile glass windows and tangles of dated electrical wiring. Their age apart, these structures were