Hurricane Irma

The storm

Irma was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever observed. A Cape Verde system that became a hurricane on August 31, 2017, it reached Category 5 on September 5 with sustained winds near 180 mph and held Category 5 intensity for roughly three days — devastating Barbuda, St. Martin, and the Virgin Islands, then raking the north coast of Cuba.

Florida spent a week watching model runs sweep the entire peninsula. The eventual track split the difference: first U.S. landfall at Cudjoe Key in the lower Florida Keys on the morning of September 10 as a Category 4 (130 mph, 929 mb per the NHC Tropical Cyclone Report), second landfall at Marco Island that afternoon as a Category 3 (115 mph).

Irma's wind field was enormous — tropical-storm-force winds spanned roughly 400 miles — so the whole state took damage regardless of track. Surge ran 5–10 ft in the Keys and pushed water into both coasts; Jacksonville, on the opposite side of the state from landfall, recorded record river flooding on the St. Johns. One oddity became folklore: Irma's offshore winds first sucked water out of Tampa Bay before returning it.

The evacuation was the largest in Florida history — an estimated 6.5 million people under orders.

The damage

The Keys took the direct hit. FEMA's initial assessment found about 25 percent of houses in the Keys destroyed and 65 percent significantly damaged, with mobile homes and older non-elevated structures faring worst. Marco Island and Naples took Category 3 winds; Everglades City flooded under surge.

Elsewhere the damage was broad rather than deep: roof coverings, soffits, screen enclosures, fences, and trees down across essentially every Florida county. Power outages peaked near two-thirds of the state. Statewide, the storm produced a rare event: simultaneous claim volume from all 67 counties.

NHC attributes $50 billion in damage — at the time the fifth-costliest U.S. hurricane — and 44 direct deaths in the U.S., with dozens more indirect, including 12 heat deaths at a Hollywood, FL nursing home that lost air conditioning, a case that produced criminal charges and a state generator mandate for care facilities.

The insurance aftermath

Irma generated more claims than any Florida storm before it: 1,125,588 claims and an estimated $20.7 billion in losses per FLOIR's final catastrophe reporting (November 2020). Because the damage was statewide and mostly wind, the typical claim was not a slab case but a roof case: shingle and tile damage, water intrusion, pool-cage and fence losses — high volume, moderate severity.

That claim profile fed a litigation machine that was already running. Florida's one-way attorney-fee statute and assignment-of-benefits (AOB) practice — a homeowner signs benefits over to a contractor or water-mitigation firm, which then bills and sues the carrier directly — had grown AOB suits roughly 900 percent from 2008 to 2018. Irma poured a million claims into that system. Recurring pattern: emergency water-dry-out or roofing firms solicited AOBs door-to-door, inflated invoices, and litigated denials; carriers responded by tightening scopes and denying more claims outright, catching legitimate claimants in the crossfire.

Two aftershocks defined the following years:

• Late-reported claims. Florida's then-3-year hurricane claim window (Fla. Stat. 627.70132) meant Irma claims kept arriving into September 2020, many solicited by contractors and public adjusters re-inspecting roofs years after the storm. Carriers denied late claims on prejudice and causation grounds ("that's wear and tear, not Irma"), producing a distinct litigation wave over what a 2- or 3-year-old roof claim must prove.
• Loss creep. Industry estimates of Irma's ultimate cost rose for years as litigated and reopened claims developed — a phenomenon reinsurers named in rate filings and a direct input to the Florida premium spiral that followed.

The legislative response came in 2019: HB 7065 (creating Fla. Stat. 627.7152) required AOBs to be written, itemized, and rescindable within 14 days, imposed pre-suit notice and demand requirements on assignees, and rewrote the fee entitlement for AOB suits. It slowed AOB abuse but did not end property-insurance litigation growth — that took Ian and SB 2-A's elimination of one-way fees in December 2022. Irma is the storm that proved the pre-reform system could not absorb a million claims; every Florida insurance reform since traces to it.

What policyholders learned

• The AOB fine print mattered. Signing benefits over to a contractor meant losing control of the claim — and sometimes ending up in the contractor's lawsuit. Policyholders who paid contractors directly and kept the claim in their own name kept their settlement leverage.
• "Wear and tear" became the default roof denial. On aging shingle and tile roofs, carriers attributed damage to deterioration, not wind. Claims that won paired date-specific evidence — pre-storm roof photos, satellite imagery, neighbor damage patterns — with an inspection documenting storm-consistent damage (creased shingles, fresh tile fractures).
• Depreciation drove payout gaps. Actual-cash-value payments minus percentage deductibles left many mid-sized wind claims near zero. Policyholders learned to claim recoverable depreciation after completing repairs and to submit the completion documentation that releases it.
• Late filing was legal but costly. Claims filed within the statutory window but years after the storm faced steep causation skepticism. Early filing — even a protective claim for damage not yet fully known — produced cleaner files and fewer prejudice arguments.
• Statewide events stretch everything. With every county affected, adjuster inspections lagged weeks. Policyholders who documented damage immediately (dated photos before tarping, mitigation receipts) protected both the claim and the property.
• The nursing-home deaths reframed "indirect" loss. Business-interruption, spoilage, and additional-living-expense coverage for prolonged power loss became standard questions in Florida policy reviews after Irma.