For the second time in the nine years his downtown Hallowell restaurant has been open, Chris Vallee will need to fork over as much as $60,000 to fix serious flood damage.
“You always lose all your product that’s in the basement,” said Vallee, a co-owner of The Quarry Tap Room, a bar and restaurant along the Kennebec River. “For some reason, the last couple of floods have just come so quick, you just don’t have enough time.”
The basement flood ruined food and the building’s two heat pumps. Its outdoor patio and stage washed out, sending outdoor furniture floating down the river. Vallee expects only to file an insurance claim to replace the heat pumps damaged by Monday’s devastating wind storm, which left more than 420,000 Mainers without power.
Roughly 800 home insurance claims and 130 on vehicles have been reported to State Farm in Maine since Monday, a company spokesperson said Wednesday. Other major insurers refused to provide similar data, but the havoc wreaked by Monday’s storm is becoming clear. There have been at least three deaths along with floods that have damaged buildings across the state.
“As power is restored, we expect more claims to be filed,” Dave Phillips, a State Farm spokesperson, wrote in an email.
Monday’s storm nearly doubled the workload of Kathy Commeau, a State Farm agent based in Bangor. Commeau has dealt with around 35 claims from customers already, she said, and had about 40 claims open prior to the storm.
She expects more claims will trickle in as people regain power and assess the amount of damage done to their homes and vehicles. The state’s two biggest electric utilities, Central Maine Power Co. and Versant Power, still had a combined total of nearly 219,000 customers without power just before 5 p.m. Wednesday despite making headway on restorations.
Commeau started as an insurance agent in 2021, so said this was her first “catastrophe-like” event. The most prevalent claims were wind-related damage to roofs, shingles and siding and trees falling on structures, Commeau said. Auto claims included people who were out on the roads and sustained vehicle damage due to fallen wires and trees.
This week’s storm isn’t expected to break records for the volume of claims filed, Phillips said. The historic 1998 ice storm led to 840,000 claims in the U.S. and Canada, according to a research paper. That storm caused at least $320 million in damage in Maine — the equivalent of more than $600 million now — and billions across the two countries.
“Fortunately, this coastal storm didn’t have the snow, ice, or freezing temperatures that can happen as we head into the winter months,” Phillips said.
