Kathryn Schweitzer worked recently in the yard in front of her small, yellow house in a North Port neighborhood where mildewing furniture, drywall and other personal belongings line the streets, the remains of destruction left behind by Hurricane Ian.
Schweitzer tries to shrug off the $8,000 she’s paid so far "just to get the walls back" in her flood-damaged home, because "if you can’t cry, you get to laugh."

Floridians whose properties were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Ian are expected to file between $53 billion and $74 billion in insurance claims. The federal government will disburse billions more in disaster assistance through tax relief, subsidies and direct grants.

We have written here before about the dreadful state of the property insurance market in Florida. A proof of concept was definitely not needed, but Hurricane Ian provided it anyhow. Insured losses from Ian have been estimated at between $28 billion and $47 billion; add uninsured losses and estimates balloon to $70 billion.

They refer to it simply as ‘The Storms of 98.’ Fierce rains and high tides combined to make San Francisquito Creek overflow its banks at 1 a.m., inundating houses, cars and streets. Firefighters used boats to rescue people trapped in their homes and school buses took evacuees to the Cubberley Community Center for shelter in the predawn hours. Approximately 1,700 properties in East Palo Alto, Palo Alto and Menlo Park were damaged.

A wildfire that destroyed nearly 1,100 homes and businesses in suburban Denver last winter caused more than $2 billion in losses, making it by far the costliest in Colorado history, the state insurance commissioner said.

The Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, a state program that provides critical backup coverage to property insurers, is estimated to have $10 billion in losses from Hurricane Ian, officials said Wednesday.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) has issued an advisory that policyholders should be on the lookout for scammers, as the number of insurance claims filed related to Hurricane Ian hits nearly half a million.

In late July of 2018, massive wildfires blazed across Northern California. At the same time in Colorado, weather alerts went out warning of heavy thunderstorms and baseball-sized hail. The two disasters were separated by a thousand miles, but scientists are now finding they’re connected.

Final numbers won’t be available for months, but one thing is certain: An overwhelming number of drivers in Hurricane Ian’s path will be replacing a vehicle at a time when inventories are already tight.

Preliminary analysis of Hurricane Ian’s deadly storm surge suggests the Gulf of Mexico pushed as high as 15 feet above normally dry ground on Fort Myers Beach as it made landfall, the National Hurricane Center said Thursday.

The last week of September, 2022, the State of Florida braced for what was categorized to be one of the worst storms to make landfall in U.S. history. Initially, all weather channels displayed the storm’s trajectory heading towards Tampa Bay.

In August, flooding immersed Pakistan as three months of monsoons, following a drought, took their toll on farmland and humanity. The previous month, Vancouver, Canada launched a lawsuit against oil producers, placing the blame for climate change on them.

The difficult 2020 and 2021 hurricane seasons are fading from memory, but it will take a long time for Louisiana to recover. It’s not just the blue roof tarps that still dot the landscape from Lake Charles to Lafourche.

Many feared that one big storm could cost every homeowner in Florida if the state-backed insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corp., couldn’t afford to pay out claims from its more than a million policies.

By all accounts, we were extremely lucky. Just 24 hours before landfall, Hurricane Ian was expected to come ashore just south of Tampa Bay, putting my home in Bradenton in the projected direct path of a very significant storm.