Weakened Earl Mostly Spares East Coast, Insurers

After a week of worrying and preparation, Hurricane Earl managed to mostly miss the mid-Atlantic, and largely fizzled out before it reached Massachusetts. That was good news for people with coastal homes and businesses, and turned what was expected to be a modestly costly storm for U.S. insurers into one that appears to have been almost a complete nonevent. In the days leading up to the storm, insurance companies with customers on the East Coast began organizing an army of claims representatives and scrambling their fleets of mobile response units.