Category 4 Hurricane Ian, which first hit the Gulf Coast on Wednesday, pummeled large stretches of Florida’s western coastline, including the Fort Myers region, as ocean seas pounded the shoreline and the storm dumped copious amounts of rain, flooding interior regions. The current death toll from the storm has passed over 70 at this time with first responders still searching through remains.
“Ian could financially ruin thousands of families in Florida. There’s no better way to say it,” Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute told Politico. In particular, if they lacked flood insurance, he continued, people may be “devastated” by the storm’s effects.
Only 29% of people in the nine counties where a disaster designation has been authorized by the White House have flood insurance, according to E&E News. Around 2.8 million people live in the counties of Charlotte, Collier, DeSoto, Hardee, Hillsborough, Lee, Manatee, Pinellas, and Sarasota.
Only 100 of the 8,000 or so families in Hardee County have federal flood insurance. As a result, if Ian causes the houses of thousands of inhabitants to be destroyed, they may be in big danger.
“There are going to be a lot of folks without flood coverage,” said Carolyn Kousky, an expert on floods. “If you don’t have insurance, economic recovery from these events is really hard.”
According to one estimate, the storm could cost between $55-65 billion in damage to infrastructure, homes, and farms in the Sunshine State. Florida’s citrus industry is expected to take an especially hard hit because of the storm.
“Florida is already having a problem with [insurance] availability. It’s having a problem with affordability. And it’s having a problem with reliability when insurance companies are going insolvent,” said Nancy Watkins, a principal with an actuarial consulting group. “All three of the pillars of a sustainable market are under threat.”