As Doug Hoare looks at his home he feels “lucky” it’s still got its old roof after a freak hailstorm unleashed fury on the area more than 18 months ago.
Key points:
- The giant hail storm’s corridor of roof damage stretches from Biloela to Yeppoon
- The damage bill from the storm continues to mount as more people put in claims
- A major discussion within the insurance industry about the standard of roofing materials has been sparked
The retired railway worker’s roof appears to have survived the April 2020 storm unscathed after hailstones, some as big as tennis balls, battered Central Queensland.
His home is one of the few in his street near the Rockhampton Hospital not sporting a shiny new corrugated covering as part of a massive storm recovery operation involving more than 14,000 insurance claims from the giant-hail disaster.
The storm blasted a corridor of damage stretching 170 kilometres from Biloela to Yeppoon, with an insurance bill estimated by international analyst Perils to be in excess of $850 million.
That number is expected to continue to rise as more homeowners discover further damage.
“The hail was bigger than a golf ball, jagged and plenty of them,” Mr Hoare, who is in his 80s, recalls about the Sunday afternoon storm.
“I’m getting old and they are the biggest ones I’ve ever seen.”
Mr Hoare wasn’t worried about hail damage at his house initially but was prompted to call his insurer months later when he noticed new roofs being installed across his suburb of The Range.
An assessor came out to inspect his roof but when he climbed down the only damage to report was a few dents in the awning.
Mr Hoare was “very surprised” at this considering the extent of the hail damage in homes all around him.
Only a few metres away the house next door has a $62,000 replacement roof due to dents all over its original 25-year-old covering.
He can only put his good fortune down to the quality of his 45-year-old corrugated iron roof and its steep pitch.
“It might be a case of ‘they don’t build them like that anymore’,” he said.
“It’ll be thicker than the ones they are doing now. But I feel lucky because if we don’t have to have a new roof, I don’t want one. It’s got a very high peak so it’d be an awkward roof to do.”
Finding damage
Rockhampton roof contractor Clint Whitman, who is booked out until 2023 due to ongoing hail repairs, said he had inspected several homes for concerned owners following no-damage roof reports from insurance companies.
Mr Whitman said on a few occasions he had found enough damage to warrant an insurance claim and had provided photo evidence to support his findings to eventually produce a positive result for the homeowners.
RACQ’s head of property and niche claims Paul Goan said he was aware of remarkable outcomes for some Rockhampton residents among the concentrated areas of damage.
“It’s a little bit amazing,” Mr Goan said.
“I have actually had the opportunity to visit [the region] earlier in the year and get to see some of our members who were impacted.
“In some instances, there were stories where quite bizarrely some homes weren’t impacted at all. Even some solar panels, which you think would be consistently damaged within a street, escaped damage.”
Insurance claims still trickling in
New claims from the 2020 storm continue to flow in to the RACQ at about five a week and Mr Goan encouraged anyone living in the zone of impact to contact their insurer.
He said roofing standards were being looked at.
“We’ve had to bring a lot of our roofs up to meet current standards and that sometimes involves replacing the roof or upgrading the battens, for example.
“I think modern materials still have a pretty high standard, however they may be different in construction and integrity to those needs in the past, but I’m not an expert to comment on that too much.”
He says there are major discussions underway involving the Insurance Council of Australia, an array of insurers and other industry stakeholders around just what strong home resilience would look like in the future and how homes should be built to ensure they are right for their location.
“How do we make sure we’re building homes that are less likely to be impacted by flood [for example] and then add materials that makes them a little bit more resilient,” he said.
As of mid-November, the RACQ had received 3,736 claims from the Central Queensland hailstorm of April 2020.
Of these, 2,782 were for damage to homes with the vast majority (92 per cent) including damaged roofs.
The other 954 claims were for damage to cars.
To date, 91.9 per cent of home claims have been finalised and 98.6 per cent of motor vehicle claims have been closed. The cost so far to RACQ is just over $102 million.
