It is said that hail cause an average of about $1 billion in damage to crops and property each year. If that's true, a recent hailstorm in North Texas is quickly approaching half that amount on its own.
The Insurance Council of Texas has already issued another update to a massive hailstorm that pelted the city of Amarillo with hail up to the size of baseballs on May 28. ICT says insured losses are expected to reach $400 million.
The new predicted insured-loss total is a quick jump from an earlier estimate of $200 million released about three days after the storm pounded Amarillo, Texas' fourteenth-largest city, in the state's Panhandle—within the same line as the recent string of severe weather affecting Oklahoma.
ICT spokesman Mark Hanna says about 35,000 vehicles and thousands of homes have been damaged by the May 28 storm. Windshields were shattered and roofs sustained heavy damage. Hanna reports the Drury Body Shop in Amarillo says there is a two-month wait for repairs.
Roofers say they will still be busy with repairs at this time next year. One roofer Hanna spoke to, Brandon Roberts of West Texas Roofing, says high-end roofs and the highest class of impact-resistant asphalt shingles are totaled out.
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration says hail causes about $1 billion dollars in damage, on average, to crops and property each year. Events involving wind, hail or flood accounted for $14.8 billion in insured catastrophe losses in 2011 dollars from 1992 to 2011 (not including payouts from the National Flood Insurance Program), according to ISO.
Earlier this month tornadoes and hail in the North Texas region on May 15 caused about $250 million in insured losses, according to preliminary estimates from ICT.
Hanna says the estimate will likely change since the storm affected a large area—seven or eight counties—and insurers continued to count claims. The storms included softball-sized hail and cut power to tens of thousands of home and businesses.
This time of year has not been kind to Texas vehicles. Last year insured losses from a June hailstorm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were about $900 million—and that followed insured losses of about $750 million from tornadoes and hail in the same area in April 2012.
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