Houston, Texas hit by hurricane-like winds, flash flooding during deadly storms

Houston, Texas, was hit by deadly storms that reportedly blew out windows of high-rise buildings, caused flash flooding and knocked out power to nearly a million homes and businesses.

Four people died as a result of the storms, during which Houston Mayor John Whitmire observed winds reaching 100 mph — the equivalent of Hurricane Ike — causing widespread damage to downtown.

According to utility tracking service PowerOutage.us, nearly 1 million customers were without power in Texas as of Thursday evening, with the vast majority of outages occurring in Harris County, which includes Houston and is home to more than 4 .7 million inhabitants.

Flights were also grounded at Houston’s two main airports due to weather conditions, and the Houston Independent School District canceled school Friday due to severe weather and flooding.

It’s no secret that the United States has suffered greatly from severe convective storms (SCS) recently. Moody’s noted in a report earlier this year that the P&C sector faced significant financial setbacks in 2023, mainly attributed to a series of SCSs rather than major catastrophes.

These storms, including hail, straight-line winds, and tornadoes, although individually less costly, collectively caused considerable damage, exceeding $60 billion of a total estimated $100 billion in insured losses.

Aon’s weekly cat report, released on April 12 of this year, indicated that SCS, which occurred the previous week, would result in economic and insurance losses in the hundreds of millions or more.

In it, it was confirmed that approximately 450 storm reports were submitted to the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) between April 8 and 11, all stretching from Texas to South Carolina.

Aon noted that the greatest damage was due to extreme rainfall, primarily in states like Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.

Then, on May 3, the broker observed more severe weather events, as well as flooding. which affected the central states of the United States between April 25 and May 2.

Several powerful tornadoes reportedly caused catastrophic damage in Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma, resulting in the destruction of many homes and businesses.

On this occasion, Aon declared that losses could potentially amount to billions of dollars, both economically and insured.