This year’s stormy season was striking, not in terms of the number of claims, but in terms of the amounts paid between May 1 and August 31, insurers paid out more than HUF 9.1 billion or set aside almost 95,000 claims for housing insurance contracts. the Association of Hungarian Insurers (Mabisz) informed MTI on Monday.
Last year, insurers paid about 6.6 billion forints and a year earlier 4.1 billion forints for retail storm damage.
Since 2010, Mabisz has been aggregating data for the summer storm season based on the same parameters. In the past 12 years, the summer period of 2010 was the most disaster-stricken, when insurers paid HUF 30 billion for 312,000 claims between May and August after there were major floods in the country at that time, the association recalled.
According to the summary, since 2010 companies have paid more than HUF 102 billion for nearly one and a half million retail reports.
This year, most announcements followed the storms of July 9th as well as August 1st. In addition to the capital, Pest, Baranya, Bács-Kiskun, Komárom, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, Somogy and Hajdú-Bihar counties, as well as Kadarkut, Tata, Pécs, Debrecen, Selly and Dunakeszi were hit hardest by the weather.
According to the announcement, there was a striking amount of ice damage this year; in addition to soaking and roof damage, lightning and its secondary induction effects caused significant damage. Mabis mentioned as an example that in Sellyé, the storm and hail caused damage to the entire roofing of many buildings, causing millions of damage to the houses.
Lightning damage is a separate item in insurance statistics, with totals for the first eight months of the year. This year, a remarkably large number of such 6,400 such claims have been received by insurers, almost six times as many as last year. The amount paid or reserved is more than six times higher than last year, HUF 918 million. There was a lightning strike, which caused 6 million forints in damage.
Compared to last year, insurers paid out HUF 2.4 billion more or set aside a reserve for claims incurred this year due to the secondary induction effect of lightning strikes. In such cases, lightning strikes nearby will destroy computer and entertainment electronic devices and household appliances. State-of-the-art equipment with integrated circuits is more exposed to lightning, so overvoltages from the networks cause them to fail more often than with similar equipment used before, Mabisz pointed out.
The organization also indicated that the storm season could have caused much more damage to the population because roughly one in four properties is uninsured and losses for injured parties without a home insurance contract are not included in the claims statistics.
