Heavy wind, hail and rain storms—a “ring of fire” that struck most states east of the Rocky Mountains May 11-16—will likely produce substantial insurance claims, catastrophe modeling firm Karen Clark & Co. predicts.
KCC’s latest event report estimates the collective storms will generate $2.5 billion in insurance claims, affecting residential and commercial properties and automobiles.
Most of the damage hit the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, the firm noted. However, 12 of those states will likely see insured losses higher than $100 million: Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The weather system led to more than 900 reports of wind gusts higher than 58 miles per hour, over 500 hail reports and 28 tornadoes. More than 600,000 power outages were reported in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states.
High winds, downed trees and power lines produced thousands more power outages across the U.S., KCC said.
KCC explained that the storm activity was mostly along “an arc from Texas to Kansas, through the Ohio Valley to the Mid-Atlantic states”—something meteorologists described as a “ring of fire.” The weather event began a blocking pattern on the West Coast that clashed with subtropical air, and it was intense.
“The ring of fire conditions persisted for several days while southerly flow continued to supply the Southeast with unstable, subtropical air,” KCC wrote. “The instability built up to such an extent that when the blocking pattern finally broke, it took only a weak upper air disturbance to trigger the development of supercell storms in Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut.”
Source: Karen Clark & Co.