Why home insurance is unaffordable, even in places without wildfires or hurricanes

toggle caption Rebecca Hersher/NPR

The storm blew into Cozad, Neb., in the wee hours of Saturday, June 29, 2024. The wind felt like a hurricane. The hail was the size of softballs.

"I was in the window, I was crying," remembers Soledad Avalos, who has lived with her husband in their home in Cozad for 35 years. "Seeing all the damage [to] the cars and the house."

When the sun came up, the extent of the damage became clear. Cozad is a small town of about 4,000 people, surrounded by corn fields. Crops were flattened. Virtually every vehicle parked outside that night had a broken windshield. Nearly every roof in town was leaking, or worse. Siding was missing, paint had been stripped away. The storm came from the northwest, and so nearly every northwest-facing window was cracked. Both the hospital and the school were in disrepair.

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"Those softball-sized hail stones just punched a hole through the roof membrane, and water was just pouring through the ceiling like a waterfall, or a shower," says Robert Dyer, the CEO of the Cozad Community Health System, which runs Cozad Community Hospital, the only hospital in town. "Tiles were coming down, hunks of old plaster. It was just pretty devastating." The hospital's emergency department had to shut down for several hours, and the building is still being repaired more than a year later.

toggle caption Rebecca Hersher/NPR

Hailstorms like the one that hit Cozad don't often make national headlines, because they are usually hyper-local events that hit just one town, or one neighborhood in a larger city.