‘Kitty cat’ storms hitting US heartland are growing threat to home insurance
By Jake Bittle, The Guardian.
Excerpt: The rising cost of homeowner’s insurance is now one of the most prominent symptoms of the climate crisis in the US. Major carriers such as State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from offering fire insurance in California... and dozens of small insurance companies have collapsed or fled from Florida and Louisiana following recent large hurricanes. The problem is fast becoming a crisis that stretches far beyond the nation’s coastal states. ...insurers have raised premiums higher than ever and dropped customers even in inland states such as Iowa. ...so-called “severe-convective storms” are large and powerful thunderstorms that form and disappear within a few hours or days, often spinning off hailstorms and tornadoes as they shoot across the flat expanses of the central United States. The insurance industry refers to these storms as “secondary perils” – the other term of art is “kitty cats”, ...smaller than big natural catastrophes.... Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9% every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50bn in insured losses combined.... No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters....