Helene claims there are already over 65,700 in Florida – far more than Idalia

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

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

Many of the Helene claims were 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 sees thousands of claims from other states. It was the leading provider of home and auto insurance in Georgia and South Carolina at the end of 2023, according to the latest data from AM Best, and has significant exposure in Florida and North Carolina. The Illinois-based firm said on Sept. 30 that it has received more than 50,000 auto and homeowner complaints related to Helene and expects that number to rise.

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

So far, about 33,130 of Florida’s total claims have been filed for residential property damage, and 30,020 have come from other lines of business, OIR noted. About 2,260 had been locked up with pay.

About 1,715 flood claims were filed with private flood insurance carriers — four times as many as in Hurricane Idalia.

Flood claims with private insurers and the National Flood Insurance Program could increase in number in the coming days. ICEYE, a firm that analyzes satellite images to calculate storm damage, said more than 100,000 buildings in the Southeast were affected by storm surges and flooding from within Helene.

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

Florida’s west coast was hit hard by Helene’s unusually high surge, which reached 15 feet in some places, and the Asheville, North Carolina area saw unprecedented flooding from the torrential rain, according to news reports .

In the Southeast, more than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the region from Hurricane Helene and a rainstorm ahead of it — an unprecedented amount of water that stunned experts, the Associated Press reported.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If they focused only on the state of North Carolina, that amount of water would be 3.5 feet (more than 1 meter) deep. That’s enough to fill over 60 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

“This is an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I haven’t seen anything in my 25 years of working with the weather service that is so geographically large and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

North Carolina weather officials said their maximum was 31.33 inches in the small town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also received more than 2 feet of rain.

Before Hurricane Harvey in 2017, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would be measuring rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, parts of South Dakota. We witness events year after year where we measure precipitation in feet.”

The South Carolina Department of Insurance has posted a schedule for Helene data calls from insurers. The first report on storm claims will be on October 11.

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

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