Roof destroyed by Hurricane Harvey Shane Johnson removes items from a family home destroyed in the wake of Harvey, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017, in Rockport, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Hurricane Harvey will be remembered as an epic flooding disaster — and rightly so. But there is more to the story of this brutal hurricane. Along the Gulf shores of the Texas Coastal Bend, Harvey's fierce Category 4 winds delivered a massive blow to an area that is still recovering one year later. When Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas, on August 26, 2017, with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph, it was the first major (Category 3 or higher) hurricane to make landfall in the United States since Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Harvey was also the second most costly hurricane in U.S. history after Hurricane Katrina, causing an estimated $125 billion in damage. |

IBHS damage assessment team went to Texas

On August 29, three days after Harvey made its initial landfall, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) deployed a damage assessment team to Texas specifically to study the wind damage caused by this storm. The team consisted of four IBHS engineers, two staff from Swiss Re and two staff from State Farm's Technology Research and Innovation Lab. The team performed wind damage assessments on 213 structures spanning five wind speed zones, collecting quantitative data using IBHS' custom damage assessment software. |

Help guide insurers

What did they discover? Key findings in this report can help guide insurers and catastrophe modelers, as well as home repair, roofing and construction considerations for years to come in wind-prone and wind damaged communities. Here are 12 key findings from the Hurricane Harvey Wind Damage Investigation:

Want to continue reading?
Become a Free PropertyCasualty360 Digital Reader

Your access to unlimited PropertyCasualty360 content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:

  • Breaking insurance news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Weekly Insurance Speak podcast featuring exclusive interviews with industry leaders
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical converage of the employee benefits and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, BenefitsPRO and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.

Jayleen R. Heft

Jayleen Heft is the digital content editor for PropertyCasualty360.com. Contact her at [email protected].

Catastrophe & Restoration
Loss Control
Weather Risk