How Florida let a top insurer abandon homeowners in their time of greatest need
< < Go Back
Every week or so, Edward Raggie walks through his front door and enters a painful, infuriating time warp.
Everything looks exactly the way it did that day in December, when he and his wife, Joanne Ragge, hastily packed up their Hurricane Ian battered home after learning that dangerous mold had spread behind their white ceilings and bright blue walls. Their roof still leaks, its protective tarp peeling from the hot sun. Inside, brown insulation from the gaping hole in their ceiling pools on their swollen, lifted floors. Boxes of their family photos and belongings, stacked haphazardly, are still waiting to be moved out of the living room’s dank, musty air.
The couple, in their late 60s, are frozen in this “hell,” Ed says, because their insurance company, United Property and Casualty, ignored their claims for months after the hurricane and then severely underpaid them, before going insolvent earlier this year.
“UPC abandoned me,” said Ed…
UPC, the ninth property insurer in Florida to go insolvent since 2021, and the largest to do so in 15 years, left many of its Florida customers in a similar nightmare,
More From The Washington Post (subscription required):
Rss Feed