It was all about the storms this year. They were the big news surrounding the insurance industry, with several named storms hitting in a severe and costly Atlantic hurricane season, and a few massive natural catastrophes abroad driving up losses and wreaking havoc globally.
Claims Journal put together a list of our most popular stories for the year. While domestic and international storms dominated the news, big lawsuits with high stakes also were among the most read articles on the news site, including a suits involving the worlds’ best known burger chain and a dust up over a popular TV game show.
Following are Claims Journal’s most popular articles for 2024.
Storms drove losses, and Claims Journal readers are—naturally—driven to consume news about losses and claims.
The third quarter of 2024 saw a number of significant disaster events, which drove year-to date economic losses above at least $258 billion and insured losses of $102 billion, according to Aon plc in its Q3 Global Catastrophe Recap – October 2024 report, which aggregates and analyzes global natural catastrophe data.
The report reveals that there were at least 280 notable global natural disaster events in the Q1-Q3 period. Losses from Hurricane Milton and additional events expected in the rest of the calendar year, however, will likely push total annual insured losses above those seen in 2023 ($125 billion), Aon said.
Economic losses for the first nine months were significantly lower than losses during the same period in 2023 ($351 billion).
Third-quarter insured losses were driven by three costly Atlantic hurricanes (Helene, Beryl and Debby), severe convective storm (SCS) outbreaks in the United States and Canada, as well as flooding in Central Europe.
Almost two weeks after Hurricane Milton made landfall near Sarasota, Florida, as a Category 3 storm, claims and loss totals continued to rise. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation said carriers had reported more than 221,582 claims and an estimated insured loss total of more than $2.7 billion.
Those numbers kept rising. Flooding from Milton appears to have been more extensive than initially determined, affecting nearly 185,000 buildings all across Florida, says a new analysis from ICEYE, a firm that uses satellite images to measure damage for the insurance industry.
CoreLogic earlier had reported that insured wind and flood losses from Milton would be between $17 billion to $28 billion, and that property restoration would be a difficult process.
Officials in two Southeastern states took steps to hold insurers or recipients of insurance funds accountable after Hurricanes Helene and Milton spurred thousands of insurance claims.
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance reminded insurance carriers that they must soon report information about claims stemming from Hurricane Helene, which brought severe flooding to the eastern part of the state. Insurers should report the data through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, in six monthly reports starting Nov. 5.
The data call applies to all property/casualty insurers in the state, including surplus lines carriers and those that write excess flood coverage. The spreadsheet information should be submitted through the NAIC data collection portal, Insurance Commissioner Carter Lawrence said in his Oct. 17 bulletin.
Florida’s Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, a state-created layer of reinsurance, expects to pay out about $4.6 billion to help cover insurers’ losses in Hurricanes Helene and Milton. But that won’t trigger a surcharge on premiums.
And a number of Florida property insurers will take a hit from the recent storms, but that, too, will be manageable.
That’s the word from the Cat Fund’s advisory council and from KBRA, the ratings firm previously known as Kroll Bond Rating Agency, which rates about 13 Florida-based carriers.
“While two major hurricanes hit Floridian shores within a two-week period, preliminary gross and net loss estimates for homeowners’ carriers indicate that full-year … earnings will be significantly reduced but are expected to remain positive, with no appreciable erosion in capital and continued near-term ratings stability,” KBRA said in a report.
It was stormy all over the globe this year.
Barcelona’s transport system had ground to a halt, as Catalonia was the latest Spanish region to be hit by extreme storms that killed more than 200 people in neighboring Valencia.
Flooded streets brought traffic to a standstill in the capital of Catalonia, while local train services were suspended for a day. Flights were also redirected from Barcelona’s airport, with parts of Catalonia under a red alert for torrential rains. Schools suspended classes in nine cities in the south of the region.
The floods that devastated the Spanish region are expected to trigger total insurance losses in excess of €3.5 billion ($3.8 billion), Moody’s estimates.
Another popular story reported on Taiwan suspending trading on its $2.5 trillion stock exchange as powerful typhoon Kong-rey barreled toward the archipelago.
The storm first hit Taiwan and Philippines before affecting East China, South Korea and Japan in late October. Kong-rey was strongest storm to hit the region in three decades.
Trami and Kong-rey in October were especially destructive, causing more than 7 billion pesos ($119 million) in crop losses, according to government data — more than the total combined agricultural damages caused by storms in the first nine months of the year.
Successive storms hitting the Philippines this late in the season is “quite rare, but not impossible,” said Gerry Bagtasa, a professor at the University of the Philippines’ Institute of Environmental Science and Meteorology. It’s a characteristic of La Niña, with a similar event occurring in 2020.
Lawsuits were also among the most read articles on the site this year. And any articles that also involved social media platforms really drove up readership.
Meta Platforms Inc. failed in a bid to challenge a class action suit in the U.K. that alleged Facebook abused its dominant position and exploited its users’ personal data.
The U.K.’s Court of Appeal refused to permit Meta and Facebook’s UK unit to challenge a competition appeals court which had greenlit a revised version of the lawsuit. The court rejected Meta’s appeal at a hearing on October 7, but only published the detailed ruling on Friday.
The case at a London competition tribunal was filed on behalf of 44 million British Facebook users, who alleged the social network only gave access to its platform in exchange for user data that generated billions in revenue, according to competition expert Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, who brought the collective claim.
Abbott Laboratories and a unit of Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc were cleared by a jury over claims they hid risks their premature-infant formulas can cause a bowel disease that severely sickened a baby boy. It was the companies’ first trial win in litigation over the products.
Jurors in state court in St. Louis reached the verdict at the end of October, ending the latest trial of more than 1,000 lawsuits alleging the formulas can cause necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, a bowel ailment that has been linked to deaths and brain damage. Other juries earlier this year held the companies liable in separate trials, including a nearly $500 million verdict against Abbott in July in the same St. Louis courthouse.
The jury deliberated for less than a day before rejecting claims that formulas made by Abbott and Reckitt’s Mead Johnson caused NEC in Elizabeth Whitfield’s son.
Sony Pictures Television Inc. accused CBS Studios Inc. in a lawsuit of leaving millions of dollars on the table in the network’s distribution of the popular Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune game shows.
Sony, the producer of the programs, claims CBS has made more than $1 billion profit from a distribution agreement going back 35 years, but isn’t working aggressively enough to maximize revenue from licensing the shows to local TV stations and selling advertising in them.
For years, CBS projected flat to 2% growth in licensing revenues year-over-year, leading Sony to become “skeptical of and concerned about those projections,” according to the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. Sony said the first year it got involved in negotiations for some ABC stations, licensing fees grew 17%.
McDonald’s was sued by consumers in a proposed class action stemming from the E.coli outbreak linked to onions in the fast-food chain’s Quarter Pounders.
Amanda McCray of Chicago and William Michael Kraft of Davie, Florida, said they experienced many symptoms associated with E.coli infection after buying Quarter Pounders this month.
Both said they would not have bought their burgers had McDonald’s disclosed the risk of contamination, and have suffered damages because of McDonald’s actions.
The lawsuit filed in Chicago federal court seeks unspecified damages, but exceeding $5 million, for all people in the United States who bought Quarter Pounders contaminated with E.coli.
McDonald’s halted Quarter Pounder sales in October in one-fifth of its 14,000 U.S. restaurants after an outbreak that killed at least one person and sickened 75 people.
Was this article valuable?
Here are more articles you may enjoy.
US Treasury Says It Was Breached by Chinese-Backed Hacker 
After 20 Years, the Post-Tsunami Generation Stays Vigilant for Future Disasters 
The War on Wildfires Is Going High-Tech 
AT&T, Verizon Say Networks Now Clear After Salt Typhoon Hack 
Want to stay up to date?
Get the latest insurance news
sent straight to your inbox.