Hurricane Irma caused billions of dollars worth of damage in Florida – but it could have been much, much worse, says one insurer.
Citizens’ Property Insurance had received 45,681 claims as of Wednesday morning, and the insurer said it anticipated about 70,000 Irma-related claims over the next 18-24 months. But that’s 44% below the 125,000 claims it expected in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.
“It’s still devastating, certainly, for those 70,000 people,” Michael Peltier, Citizens’ spokesperson, told the
Tampa Bay Times. “(But) the storm as a whole was less severe from an estimate standpoint than we had initially estimated.”
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Peltier told the
Times that most of Citizens’ claims came from areas hardest-hit by Irma. Miami-Dade policyholders filed 36% of its claims, while policyholders in the Keys – an area especially hard-hit – filed 15.4%.
Peltier said that Citizens’ was estimating its losses from the storm to be about $1.23 billion. CoreLogic estimated the total insured damage from Irma to be between $13.5 billion and $19 billion.
That would still put Irma among the top five costliest storms, the
Times reported. The most expensive ever was Hurricane Katrina, which cost $49.8 billion in 2005.
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