Home Care In Milton, ON

It’s been 2 weeks since Hurricane Milton roared into western central Florida and then bisected the State with hurricane winds. Milton eventually moved off of eastern north Florida a day later. Several central and northern Florida lakes and rivers continue to remain above flood stage. Officials say it could be weeks if not months before water levels return to normal.

More than a week and a half after #HurricaneMilton made landfall residents are still experiencing devastating flooding. This is in the Ridge Manor area, which is near the Withlacoochee River. Residents say the river has continued to rise over the last few days. @FOX13News pic.twitter.com/JNbabaZnVE

— Jordan Bowen FOX 13 (@JordanBowenFOX) October 19, 2024

Residents in some of the hardest flooded regions say help is coming too little too late. Some residents in Orange City are still relying on boats to get around their neighborhoods.

Flooding is so bad in Orange City after Milton that leaders are building a temporary causeway | Click on the image to read the full story https://t.co/5ZoCeA5BzG

— WESH 2 News (@WESH) October 21, 2024

Some rivers along interior Florida remain in major flood stage. While the water is receding, it’s a slow drain for many flood stricken areas.

1 of 4

2 of 4

3 of 4

4 of 4

On top of the stress and strain of rebuilding after back to back hurricanes, many popular “snowbird” destinations in Florida are struggling to reopen before the influx of seasonal snowbird residents arrives.

Hurricane Milton ravaged one of the most popular areas for 'snowbirds' on Florida's Gulf Coast #GulfCoast #Hurricane #CentralFlorida #Weatherhttps://t.co/OHTJgCTnNj

— Stephen Ames Berry (@writerredux) October 23, 2024

“Snowbird” season generally runs after Halloween to around Easter. According to the Census Bureau, roughly 1.5 million people relocate to Florida to escape harsh winters up north. Florida gets more temporary residents each winter season than any other U.S. state in the country. But damage along Florida’s west coast could steer some much needed tourist dollars away.

After Milton's wrath, experts see a reshaping of Florida tourism. "Many of the mom-and-pops may take the insurance payout and decide not to rebuild." https://t.co/YvpF8IRQOT via @TravelWeeklyUS

— Jean Gruss (@JeanGruss) October 22, 2024

To compound the flooding, king tides and strong onshore flow off the Atlantic are working to add additional resistance to the river drainage process - which is causing the St Johns river to rise again.

Because of this, the river is forecast to remain above major flood stage at least into next week with conditions expected to level off sometime in November.

Damages caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton will likely be intertwined

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Just as the destructive punch of Helene and Milton – two major hurricanes that impacted the Sarasota-Manatee area in a 13-day timeframe – will be forever linked, the value of the storm damage will be linked as well.

Before Helene hit, Hurricane Ian had been the most costly hurricane for Sarasota and Manatee counties, with insurance losses totaling about $1.25 billion in Sarasota County and $65.6 million in Manatee County – not including those incurred by the National Flood Insurance Program – according to CoreLogic, an Irvine, California-based real estate data and analytics company.

Damage from Milton, which made landfall Oct. 9 near Siesta Key, and Helene, which made landfall Sep. 26 in the Big Bend area of Florida, will ultimately prove costly as well.

Sarasota County estimates that about $333.7 million of structural damage in the unincorporated area of the county has been recorded after Milton, while almost $306 million in damage was caused by Helene.

A city of Sarasota spokesman said via email that the municipality suffered about $300 million in damage from Helene, while Milton damage was still being assessed.

Neither the cities of Venice nor North Port had structural damage estimates. Even without those assessments, damage from the two-storm totals almost $634 million in Sarasota County. That also does not count the Town of Longboat Key, where Town Manager Howard Tipton told the Herald-Tribune that Hurricane Helene had inflicted between $175 million and $200 million in structural damage on the barrier island that is split between Sarasota and Manatee counties; he expects Milton to add another $15 million in damage.

Longboat houses on the south side of the key fared better

Tipton said he felt lucky that the storm surge from Milton fell short of catastrophic levels forecast but the storms exposed a lot of older construction..

“The island had two different experiences,” Tipton said, then explained that homes from Town Hall south fared better than those on the northern portion of the island.

That was a function of both newer construction and better drainage in communities that were master planned by Arvida Corp. and in subsequent developments.

Manatee County officials earlier estimated losses from Milton in unincorporated Manatee County at more than $250 million but did not specify whether that included Hurricane Helene, too.

Also absent in calculations are damage to Manatee County’s five municipalities: Bradenton, Palmetto and the three cities on Anna Maria Island – Anna Maria, Bradenton Beach and Holmes Beach.

Even without those cities, the early damage report or Sarasota-Manatee eclipses $1 billion.

Statewide losses for Milton and Helene compared to Hurricane Ian

Hurricane Ian, the costliest storm in Florida history at $109 billion, generated $21.4 billion in insurance losses, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation while the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid out $1.1 billion to 387,144 homeowners and renters statewide – including $83 million in Sarasota County and $18 million in Manatee.

Statewide, the two storms are projected to cost tens of billions of dollars, based on claims tracked by the Florida Office of Information Regulation.

As of. Oct. 18, the FLOIR estimates $2.48 billion in insured losses statewide attributed to Milton as of Oct. 18 and $13.38 billion attributed to Hurricane Helene, as of Oct. 17.

CoreLogic estimates that industry-wide insured wind and flood losses from Hurricane Milton will be between $17 billion and $28 billion; and when uninsured property losses were factored in, that grows to between $21 billion and $34 billion.

County by county loss projections were not available.

Statewide, as of Oct. 18, FEMA has approved a total of $395.4 million statewide to cover losses in Florida for hurricanes Milton, Helene and Debby – including $87.4 million for Milton, $266.1 million for Helene and $41.9 million for Debby.

Bob Bunting, CEO and chairman of the Sarasota-based Climate Adaptation Center, said that uninsured losses will far exceed the insured losses.

“From my career seeing these numbers, it’s like triple the insured loss, that’s the full loss," said Bunting, who characterized the true loss for Sarasota-Manatee in the billions.

Bunting factored in the loss of businesses, such as a ground-floor restaurant on St. Armands Key that could not serve patrons while restoring and reequipping the facility.

Property Insurance claims from Hurricane Milton had topped more than 152,180 by Tuesday, with some $1.9 billion in estimated insured losses. That’s already more than the claims and losses reported for Helene, which made landfall in Florida two weeks earlier, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation posted.

The losses, while less than some had feared, will likely trigger a spike in reinsurance prices and another wave of property insurance rate increases, just as Florida regulators have touted rate stabilization in the state, industry veterans said.

“If the reinsurers are looking to increase their pricing, then that hits us and, in turn, we would look to increase our rates to cover those costs,” said Jim Santo, co-founder and CEO of St. Petersburg-based Loggerhead Reciprocal Interinsurance Exchange.

Loggerhead now holds more than 50,000 policies in force as it continues to take on thousands of policies once held by Progressive insurance companies in Florida.

“This will also be a significant event for reinsurers,” said longtime Florida insurance attorney Fred Karlinsky, chair of the Greenberg Traurig law firm’s insurance regulatory practice group. “I think they will have a tough year based on this loss, but I don’t think it will change their appetite. However, it might change their spread of risk moving forward.”

Karlinsky noted that Florida’s insurance industry, which saw 10 insurers become insolvent in 2021 and 2022, is better positioned to handle the losses from Milton than it was two and three years ago, thanks in part to legislative changes that disincentivized excess claims litigation.

Other analysts agreed that even if the remainder of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is quiet, Milton and Helene will spur reinsurance price hikes. The storm damage will reverse the signs of price stabilization observed during the 2024 mid-year reinsurance renewal season, said Steve Liu, assistant vice president of global insurance and pension ratings at Morningstar DBRS, a financial rating firm.

The claims reported to OIR by Florida carriers include more than 100,000 homeowners claims – more than twice as many as have been filed so far in flood-heavy Helene. Milton’s claims, through Sunday, just a few days after landfall near Sarasota, were about one-sixth the number of claims filed within 18 months of Hurricane Ian, a powerful storm that struck southwest Florida in 2022.

Insurers also have reported more than 21,100 private passenger auto claims from Milton, but only about 400 commercial auto claims. Commercial residential properties, including cost-beset condominiums, reported 668 claims through Sunday. Totals will rise as carriers report numbers to the OIR.

In total, private insured losses from Category 3 Milton are expected to reach $36 billion, said the disaster modeling firm Karen Clark & Co., compared to the $63 billion KCC estimated for Hurricane Ian in 2022, which left damage in other Southeastern states.

Moody’s RMS said private insured losses from Milton and Helene together will be between $35 billion and $55 billion.

Top photo: Heavy damage in Bradenton, Florida, near Cortez Bridge (Photo by Matt Mercier, a licensed drone pilot and national director of community associations for insurance advisor CBIZ.)

Topics Claims Pricing Trends Reinsurance

Was this article valuable?

Written By William Rabb

Rabb is Southeast Editor for Insurance Journal. He is a long-time newspaper man in the Deep South; also covered workers' comp insurance issues for a trade publication for a few years.

Latest Posts:

More From Author

Images from Florida, battered by two once-in-a-generation storms in a matter of weeks, are prompting a reckoning by Americans across the country.

“Will Florida be completely unlivable/destroyed in the next few years?” one Reddit user wondered. And on October 7, the science writer Dave Levitan published an essay titled “At Some Point You Don’t Go Back.”

But for anyone wondering “why do they still live there?” a report from data analytics provider First Street offers some answers. Americans are perhaps more aware of the risks of a volatile climate than it might seem, and have been migrating in response to its effects for many years. The catch: the vast majority of those moves have been local, to higher ground across town, say, or to the city next door, where better infrastructure may mean it doesn’t flood as often.

As the threat has multiplied, however, the report's authors say it’s now safe to assume that many parts of Florida have reached a “tipping point.” That’s the point at which moving a few blocks uphill isn’t enough, and so many residents are leaving the area permanently, the population could decline.

“I do think there are places where we are approaching tipping points and we will begin to see larger migration movements,” said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at First Street, which released the report last winter.

Buy that dream house: See the best mortgage lenders

“In Florida, the fact that homes are seeing longer ‘time on the market’ and lower ‘sale to list prices’ is indicative of declining demand and population outmigration,” Porter said in a recent email exchange with USA TODAY.

Florida’s real estate woes are well documented. “Of the dozen markets where prices have fallen over the past 12 months, seven are in Florida,” noted ICE, a real estate data company, in its October Mortgage Monitor. Challenging market conditions throughout the state may be in large part due to the difficulty in obtaining affordable property insurance: in some areas like Jacksonville and Cape Coral, premiums are up nearly 80% since 2019.

Contract signings are also down in Florida, recent Redfin data showed. While Hurricane Helene probably accounted for some of the decline in recent weeks, sales activity also plunged 13% compared to a year ago in Fort Lauderdale and 15% in Miami, both of which are located on the eastern coast and are so far unaffected by storms.

But as First Street data show, Florida isn't the only place climate migrants are fleeing. At the micro level, more than 800,000 census blocks in the U.S. – or 7.4% of all blocks – have already passed local “tipping points” and are seeing outright population declines. These "Climate Abandonment Areas" have had a net loss of over 3.2 million people between 2000 and 2020 that can be directly attributed to flooding, the research shows.

Many of these areas are familiar to locals: parts of Staten Island, New York, that see constant “sunny day flooding,” for example, or Bexar County, Texas, home to San Antonio - and an area not typically known for being waterlogged, Porter says.

“In Bexar County, TX, 17.1% of all blocks are declining in population and have high flood risk above the 'tipping point,' making them Climate Abandonment Areas even though the county as a whole has grown significantly between 2000 – 2020,” First Street’s report notes.

More:Homeownership used to mean stable housing costs. That's a thing of the past.

First Street’s data suggests that climate risk is already having a significant impact on local economies even if people aren’t fleeing in droves. Its model shows that many parts of the country that have seen the most growth despite being most exposed to extreme climate – the Houston metro, for example – would have attracted even more people if not for the known risks.

In fact, the “thousand-year storms” that get so much attention may not be as perilous as consistent, low-level flooding, Porter said. “Say you’re stuck in your house, you know, twice a month every month out of the year. That slowly erodes the infrastructure in the area, and people start to avoid the area because it gets reputationally branded as an area that floods.”

The 3.2 million Americans who have already left home because of climate concerns are just the beginning, First Street believes. Millions more are likely to leave in the coming decades.

Porter said he thinks Americans will soon start to take climate risk into account when house hunting just like they do school quality and walkability. "What we're going to see in the form of climate response is smarter ways of thinking about information like climate risk within cities," he said

SALT LAKE CITY — Some of the images we’ve seen from Florida and the Carolinas following the devastating one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton really tug at the heartstrings. It’s very difficult to see people flooded out of their homes and not want to do something to help.

That “help” also makes the news. We’ve reported on some of Utah’s awesome people who are collecting supplies, raising money or in some cases traveling to hurricane-impacted areas. But not all people are awesome. Some who say they are trying to help are really just trying to line their own pockets.

“Scammers will try to use these tragedies to take advantage of people and make a buck,” said Bree Fowler of CNET, who writes about cybersecurity.

Ways to stay safe

She says if you are worried about your money getting into the right hands, there are steps you can take.

For example, you’ve maybe seen in our newscasts that KSL is raising money for hurricane relief using the name of the American Red cross. Well, if you scan the QR code, you can see that it takes you to redcross.org. You don’t have to trust that KSL will pass on the money. It’s going straight into their system.

As for the Red Cross itself, let’s pretend for a second that you’ve never heard of them. On the GuideStar website that you can use to research and verify a charity’s credentials, you can type in American Red Cross in the search field and in seconds see how much money they bring in, what they do with it, and how long they’ve been around. And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can even review their IRS forms.

These are important steps that take time. A legitimate charity shouldn’t pressure you to give on the spot!

“They’re not going to have a problem with you taking a beat thinking about it and then doing your homework before you hand over your cash,” Fowler said. “Now a scammer, on the other hand, wants you to click before you think.”

If someone asks you for money in the form of a gift card, cryptocurrency, or cash – be very skeptical. A real charity will take your credit card. Plus, that will give you a traceable paper trail.

Share