TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Hurricane Idalia’s devastation has yielded close to $170 million in insured losses – and that number is likely to get higher.
The damage from the Category 4 hurricane is still being calculated, but the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) estimated $168.5 million as of Tuesday. That total includes residential and commercial property as well as private flood insurance, business interruption and other lines of business such as auto, aircraft and fire.
The latest data shows over 18,353 claims, with more than 12,600 of those coming from residential property like homeowners and mobile homeowners.
While significant, the figure is a fraction of what it could have been, given the strength of the storm. In 2022, Hurricane Ian devastated the Sunshine State with $109 billion in damage and $17 billion in estimated insured losses.
Ian made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane; Idalia was downgraded from Category 4 status to Category 3 just before it hit the Big Bend region.
Given Florida’s troubled property insurance market, Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis said the damage could have been much worse if the storm had struck a more populated area of the state.
“If there was a path that Idalia could take, that was the best output for at least the insurance market in Florida,” Patronis told CNBC last month. “So the silver lining to this, it did go through one of the least populated areas of the state.”
