Helene Claims in Florida Already More Than 65,700 – Far More than Idalia

The number of property insurance claims in Florida from Hurricane Helene had topped 65,700 by Tuesday, far more than the 25,000 seen in Hurricane Idalia a year ago, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation reported.

The total estimated insured losses in Florida had reached $657 million as of Oct. 1, more than double the losses reported in Idalia, which followed a similar path across northern Florida in August 2023.

Many of the Helene claims have been filed with Florida’s two largest property insurers, Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-created insurer of last resort; and with State Farm insurance companies. State Farm also is seeing thousands of claims from other states. It was the leading provider of home and car insurance in Georgia and South Carolina at the end of 2023, according to the most recent data from AM Best, and has significant exposure in Florida and North Carolina. The Illinois-based firm said on Sept. 30 that it had received more than 50,000 auto and homeowner claims related to Helene and expects that number to rise.

In Florida, where Helene first made landfall last week with winds reaching 140 miles per hour, the state-backed Citizens is the state’s biggest insurer. It has received about 10,000 claims as of Tuesday, a company spokesperson told Bloomberg News.

So far, some 33,130 of the total Florida claims have been filed on residential property damage, and 30,020 have come from other lines of business, OIR noted. About 2,260 had been closed with payment.

About 1,715 flood claims were lodged with private flood insurance carriers – four times the number in Hurricane Idalia.

Flood claims with private insurers and with the National Flood Insurance Program could grow in number in coming days. ICEYE, a firm that analyzes satellite imagery to calculate storm damage, said that more than 100,000 buildings in the Southeast have been affected by Helene’s storm surge and inland flooding.

“At least 10,000 buildings were inundated by over 60 inches (over 5 feet; 152 centimeters) of water,” the company said in a statement this week.

The west coast of Florida was heavily impacted by Helene’s unusually high storm surge, which reached 15 feet in some spots, and the Asheville, North Carolina, area saw unprecedented flooding from torrential rain, according to news reports.

Across the Southeast, more than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the region from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts, the Associated Press reported.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

South Carolina’s Department of Insurance posted a schedule for Helene data calls from insurers. The first report on storm claims is due Oct. 11.

Photo: An American flag bobs in the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene in the Shore Acres neighborhood in St. Petersburg, Florida, on Friday. (AP Photo/Mike Carlson)

Topics Florida Claims