Cold in Places That Never Planned for It

Thursday, September 10th, 2026 — In the second week of February 2021, a mass of Arctic air settled over Texas and stayed for six days. Temperatures in Dallas fell below zero. Houston stayed below freezing for more than 40 hours straight. The state's power grid, isolated from its neighbors and running generation that had never been winterized, shed load to avoid collapse, and more than four million customers lost electricity, many for days. Inside homes built for 100-degree summers, with water lines run through unheated attics and heat pumps that could not keep up, pipes froze and then burst as they thawed. Texas insurers received more than half a million claims from Winter Storm Uri. Insured losses ran well above $10 billion, the state attributed 246 deaths to the storm, and by claim count it rivaled any catastrophe in Texas history.

It was not a one-time event. Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022 pushed freeze losses across the Southeast, with burst pipes from Tennessee to Georgia and insured losses above $5 billion. January 2024 brought another round. Arctic outbreaks, when they come, are reaching farther south and lasting longer in regions whose housing stock, utilities, and residents have no experience with them. The result is a freeze event that behaves like a hurricane in claim volume and like nothing else in claim type.

Why southern buildings fail in a freeze

A house in Minnesota has water lines run through interior walls and conditioned space, a basement that stays above freezing, and a furnace sized for the cold. A house in Houston, San Antonio, or Atlanta is often the opposite. Supply lines run through the attic because there is no basement and the slab makes under-floor routing impractical. The attic is vented to the outdoors and sits at outdoor temperature. Exterior walls are thin and insulation is oriented toward keeping heat out. The heating system may be a heat pump that loses efficiency below about 25 degrees, or electric resistance strips that cannot run at all when the power fails. Hose bibs are uninsulated. Tankless water heaters hang on exterior walls. Pool equipment and irrigation backflow preventers sit outdoors.

Commercial buildings have their own version. Wet-pipe fire sprinkler systems run through unheated ceiling plenums, attics, and parking structures. Rooftop HVAC units have condensate lines and hydronic coils exposed to the air. Strip centers have tenant spaces heated during business hours and left cold overnight.

All of this is construction appropriate to the historical climate, and all of it produces a housing stock in which a multi-day freeze with power loss bursts a pipe in a large fraction of homes, all within the same 72 hours.

Five files from a freeze event

The coverage questions in a freeze are more varied than adjusters new to the peril expect, and the differences between the standard homeowners form and the commercial property form matter. The following scenarios cover the ground.

File one. The occupied family home. A family of four lost power at 2 a.m. on the second night of the freeze. The house dropped into the 40s by the following evening. On the third day a supply line in the attic split and, when power returned and the line thawed, water ran through the ceiling of two bedrooms and the hallway for about an hour before the family found the shutoff.

This is a covered loss under the standard homeowners form, and adjusters who reach for the freeze provision here are misreading it. The ISO HO-3 excludes freezing of plumbing only when the dwelling is vacant, unoccupied, or under construction and the insured has not used reasonable care to maintain heat or to shut off and drain the system. An occupied dwelling is outside that provision entirely. The off-premises power failure exclusion does not defeat the claim either, because the policy covers ensuing loss from a covered peril and a burst pipe in an occupied home is one. Scope the water damage, address the drying, and check for the food spoilage endorsement. Move quickly, because this house is one of thousands and the family has no water until a plumber comes.

File two. The second home. A couple owns a lake house two hours from their primary residence. Before the freeze they set the thermostat to 58 and left. Power failed on the second day and stayed off for four. A pipe in the exterior wall of the kitchen burst and the house flooded for an unknown period before a neighbor noticed water running out of the garage.

The house was unoccupied, so the freeze provision applies and the question is whether the insureds used reasonable care to maintain heat. They set the thermostat. They had no way to know the power would fail, and the policy does not require them to guarantee heat, only to take reasonable care toward it. Most carriers cover this loss, and most courts that have considered the question agree. Document the thermostat setting, the power outage records from the utility, and the timeline. The harder issue is the extended duration of the water flow and the resulting damage to flooring, cabinetry, and possibly mold, all of which follows from a covered sudden discharge and is covered, subject to any mold sublimit.

File three. The vacant rental. A landlord had a rental house sitting empty between tenants for six weeks. Heat was off to save money. Water was on. A pipe burst, the house flooded, and the landlord discovered it when a prospective tenant came to view the property a week after the freeze.

This is the loss the provision was written for. The dwelling was vacant, heat was not maintained, and the water was not shut off and drained. Absent an endorsement or policy language more favorable than the standard form, the freeze damage is excluded. Check also for the policy's vacancy provisions, which may independently limit coverage after 30 or 60 days of vacancy. Deliver the determination promptly and in writing with the specific language cited. The landlord will not be happy, and the file should be clean enough that a complaint to the state goes nowhere.

File four. The strip center sprinkler. A retail strip center with eight tenant spaces has a wet-pipe sprinkler system running through an unheated attic plenum above the tenant ceilings. The main line froze and split. When it thawed, several hundred gallons of water discharged into three tenant spaces before the fire department shut the system down. The landlord's building policy is on a standard commercial property form. Each tenant has a business owners policy.

The commercial property form's freeze provision differs from the homeowners form in a way that matters here. It excludes water damage from freezing of plumbing and fire protective systems unless the insured does its best to maintain heat in the building, or drains and shuts off the system when heat is not maintained, and it applies regardless of occupancy. The tenant spaces were heated. The attic plenum where the pipe ran was not, and arguably could not have been. Whether heat was maintained "in the building" when the conditioned spaces were heated but the pipe ran through an unconditioned space is exactly the kind of question that gets litigated, and the answer varies by jurisdiction and policy wording. Involve the coverage team early, document the building's heating configuration in detail, and coordinate with the tenants' carriers on the contents and business income claims, which have their own analysis under the tenant policies. The tenants will want to know who is paying for their inventory and their lost sales, and the answer should not depend on which adjuster they happened to reach first.

File five. The evacuated home. A homeowner left for a relative's house when the power failed and did not return for six days. A pipe burst on the fourth day. By the time she came back the house had two inches of standing water, saturated drywall in several rooms, and visible mold starting on baseboards.

The dwelling was temporarily unoccupied but was the insured's residence, and she left during a declared emergency rather than abandoning it. Most carriers treat this as an occupied dwelling for purposes of the freeze provision, and the loss is covered. The issues are mitigation and mold. The policy requires the insured to take reasonable steps to protect the property from further damage, and the question is whether leaving for six days during a disaster with no power was unreasonable. It was not, and adjusters who suggest otherwise on these files are the ones who end up in the newspaper. The mold is a resulting loss from a covered sudden discharge and is covered subject to the sublimit. Get a remediation contractor in immediately, and expect to have trouble finding one.

Handling the surge

The scenarios above are the coverage side. The operational side of a freeze event in an unprepared region is what breaks carriers.

Plumbers are the bottleneck. In Texas after Uri, wait times for a plumber ran two to four weeks in many areas, and PEX fittings, copper, and shutoff valves sold out statewide. Carriers that allowed policyholders to make their own temporary repairs, reimbursed materials on receipts, and paid for out-of-state plumbers who came in to help got water back on faster than carriers that insisted on approved vendors.

Remediation is the second bottleneck. Water sitting in a house for a week grows mold. The drying contractors that exist in a warm-weather region are sized for the occasional slab leak, and a freeze event produces more water losses in three days than they see in three years. Triage by severity, get equipment into the worst houses first, and be realistic with policyholders about timelines.

Desk and virtual adjusting are necessary and defensible. No carrier can put a field adjuster in half a million homes in a month. Photographs, video walkthroughs, plumber invoices, and remediation drying logs support a desk-adjusted claim on most freeze losses. Reserve field inspections for large losses, disputed scopes, and files where the documentation does not hold together.

Pay something early. A family with no water, no power, and a ceiling on the floor needs money for a hotel, for a plumber, for the drywall the neighbor's brother-in-law is going to hang. An advance on the undisputed portion, issued within days, changes the entire trajectory of the file. Many of the complaints from Uri came from policyholders who waited weeks for a first payment on a loss that was never in dispute.

Watch for the fraud that follows. Every surge event draws inflated remediation invoices, contractors who claim work at addresses they never visited, and occasionally a policyholder who discovers a "freeze" loss that predates the storm. Document contractor names, check drying logs against equipment counts, and refer patterns to SIU. Do not let the fraud concern slow the honest files, which are the overwhelming majority.

Watch the ALE. A house with no running water is not habitable for most families, and a plumber who is three weeks out means three weeks of hotel or rental. Adjusters accustomed to ALE on fire losses sometimes overlook it on water losses. Ask on every file whether the family is living in the house.

Before the next one

Freeze events in the South will happen again, and the housing stock will not have changed much in between. Adjusters who worked Uri or Elliott carry knowledge the industry needs. Write down what you saw: where the pipes were, what failed first, which coverage questions came up, what the plumber market did, how long remediation took. Share it with your team and your carrier's cat planning group. And when the forecast shows single digits headed for a region built for triple digits, assume the volume is coming, because the last three times, it did.