Western Storm Tolls Adding Up Steady Stream Of Claims Filed With Insurance Companies

Insurance companies are slowly getting a better sense of the toll recent winter storms have taken on Western policyholders as calls come in at a steady pace.

“These are preliminary figures. They are still coming in in a pretty steady flow,” said Debbie Smith, a spokeswoman for Bloomington, Ill.-based State Farm Insurance, which holds about 243,600 homeowner policies in Washington.

By Wednesday, 7,500 claims had been made statewide while up to 1,000 had been made in Oregon, Smith said. Another 39 claim adjustors were added to Washington’s core of 82 to keep up with demand, she said.

State Farm adjustors in California were anticipating up to 15,000 calls and $13 million in losses. Another 2,500 calls were expected in Reno, Nev., Smith said.

Estimates for insured losses throughout Washington, northern California, Oregon, Nevada and Idaho total $280 million, Washington Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn said Thursday, citing the latest information from Property Claims Service, an insurance industry data collection service.

Washington state’s insured losses account for $135 million of the total, Senn said.

Property Claims Service is a division of the industry trade group American Insurance Services Group Inc.

The figures don’t include flooding or landslide-related damage, which must be covered separately. Nor do they include uninsured damages, such as the cost of repairing roads, bridges and other public property.

By comparison, the Inaugural Day storm of 1993 claimed $190 million in insured losses in Washington state alone, Senn said.

December’s bad weather “certainly is one of the larger storms the state has seen … but the figures are manageable,” Senn said.

More than 75,000 insurance claims statewide are expected, she said.

No estimates for uninsured losses were immediately available, although County Executive Gary Locke in King County, which includes Seattle, said last week that losses in unincorporated parts of the county had reached $13.6 million.

Storms beginning Dec. 26 cut a wide swath of destruction through much of the West.

Preliminary figures from the Red Cross showed 84 homes or apartments in Washington had been destroyed, 252 suffered major damage and 446 had minor damage.

The National Flood Insurance Program run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency provides flood insurance for an annual premium of $300, said Chuck Steele, director of the mitigation division for FEMA region 10, which includes Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska.

By mid-week, there had been 140 claims in Washington, 100 in Oregon and 10 in Idaho, Steele said.

“These are very preliminary figures,” he said. “We feel there’s going to be quite a bit more coming in.”