After Easter Storms In Chattanooga Area, Recovery Is Slow And Hurdles Are High

Five months after an Easter night tornado sent trees crashing through her roof and rain cascading into her kitchen, Lauren Cameron’s home was still draped in blue tarps, wide open to the weather.

"Structurally it’s OK, and it’s harder in a way to rebuild," Cameron says, walking through the empty shell of the home off Standifer Gap Road where she’s lived for 13 years. "If it were completely destroyed, insurance would have written a check, and we could have rebuilt here or bought somewhere else."

Instead, Cameron is navigating the sometimes arduous process of documenting every loss and negotiating the terms of repairing the home with her insurance carrier.

"The burden of proof is on you to figure out what needs to be done," Cameron says. "It’s not been an easy journey. We’ve had three different adjusters, and we just got approved to replace the roof."

The Easter storms resulted in more than 15,000 insurance claims in the Chattanooga area, including nearly 11,000 for damage to residential property, according to the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance. In all, there were $444 million in losses, more than $325 million of that to residential property.