A tiny Nebraska town with less than 4,000 residents was left in ruins after softball-sized hail storm battered homes, shattered windows, and caused $100million damage — an almost unthinkable loss for a community that small.
The disaster in Cozad is part of a far larger, and largely overlooked, crisis.
Unlike Florida’s hurricanes and California’s wildfires, hailstorms rarely make national headlines. They typically strike a single town at a time, often without triggering federal disaster aid, and are less deadly than floods or fires.
But experts warn these monster storms are becoming more frequent, more destructive and more expensive across the central US — and insurers are pulling out.
Hail now causes more home-damage dollars nationwide than hurricanes in some years, and is driving insurance premiums in the Great Plains to the highest levels in America.
Nebraska now has the highest home insurance premiums in America at an average of $6,400 a year — $4,000 above the national average, according to Bankrate. Deductibles, the amount you have to pay out of pocket before accessing insurance, run from $1,000 to $5,000.
Locals say it the Cozad storm unlike anything they’ve ever seen — and experts warn it’s only getting worse.
‘People say that they have PTSD from that storm. It looked like someone took a machine gun to the side of the houses,’ longtime Cozad local Jennifer McKeone, who used to own two rental houses in town, told Daily Mail.
Cozad, Nebraska, was left in ruins after softball-sized hail storm battered homes, shattered windows, and caused $100 million in property damage
Combine harvests corn in rural Nebraska where a 2024 hail storm took out all the area’s corn crops and left farmers with a ruined season
The storm blew into Cozad in June 2024, ripping off roofs, peeling house paint and blowing over trees
The June 2024 storm ripped roofs clean off, peeled paint from houses, flattened garages and nearly destroyed the town’s school and hospital, forcing the ER to shut for hours.
McKeone said both her rental homes were so badly damaged that insurance wouldn’t cover repairs — and then her insurer dropped her altogether. She was forced to sell.
Families in the town, 200 miles from Omaha, suffered broken windows, trees falling on homes from the wind, and many still haven’t been able to afford repairs and are living in boarded up homes with tarps on the roof.
‘There was a lot of glass inside people’s homes, a lot of windows got hit and the glass flew in not out, and they still have the boarding up from after the storm which was a year ago now,’ McKeone said.
After the storm, homeowners and business owners say they were dropped by their insurers and forced to scramble for new, more expensive policies. Others saw their premiums soar overnight.
‘When insurance prices rise, the overall cost of homeownership goes up, limiting the pool of potential buyers able to afford the monthly expense. What’s missing is political urgency,’ said Dean’s professor of resilience Zhigang Feng, who researches post-disaster recovery.
That forces sellers to slash prices or leave properties sitting empty, which also drags the value of neighboring homes down.
But the hailstorms are becoming more common across the US. Across the central and eastern states, the atmospheric conditions that produce hail the size of billiard or pool balls are on the rise, Deborah Bathke, Nebraska’s state climatologist told NPR.
After windows shattered dirt and debris blew into the houses, causing even more damage that homeowners were responsible for
A Nebraskan homeowner holds a bowl of hail following a storm that caused over $100 million in damages to the town which has just 4,000 residents
Residents come to Nebraska for the picturesque farmland and rolling hills, but the state comes with major weather problems and has the highest insurance premiums in the US
Cozad local Jennifer McKeone
And as the planet warms, the Great Plains are expected to face even more frequent hail.
That growing threat is driving up home insurance prices across the entire middle of the country and ‘saddling average Americans with huge bills,’ according to a US Treasury report.
‘In Nebraska, the prices have increased, because everything to do with owning a home has gotten more expensive, the price of homes, of mortgages, of insurance, the weather is a huge factor,’ Josh Tapio, an agent at All Lines Insurance in Omaha, told Daily Mail.
‘The damage to roofs alone should be its own category.
‘It’s unaffordable for many homeowners here, and it’s only getting more expensive.’
Hailstorms caused an estimated $160 billion in damage to homes across the US in 2024 alone, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
And the weather conditions that can produce large hail have only gotten more common as the planet warms up, Deborah Bathke, Nebraska’s state climatologist, told NPR.
That comes at an enormous cost for property insurance companies who have been refusing to provide insurance, especially in Nebraska.
Hailstorms caused an estimated $160 billion in damage to homes across the US in 2024 alone, according to the Insurance Information Institute
In addition to home insurance many people had cars parked outside when the hail storm struck and battered cars too, making them undrivable until they were fixed
‘The risk is too high,’ said Tapio. ‘Many people stayed uninsured.’
For McKeone, who sold the two rents due to insurance costs, she said it’s going to have a ripple effect for years to come.
‘Now with insurance companies they only reimburse you on the depreciable amount of say, your roof so if your roof is like seven years old they’re gonna factor that in and lower the value of the roof and the home,’ she said.
‘Then it’s too expensive for people and the home sits in disrepair.
‘Also, a lot of people had insurance that they didn’t realize didn’t cover cosmetics, like paint and siding damage, that they can’t pay to replace themselves.
‘It’s obviously a financial burden, especially when you have other bills. A lot of people I know their cars were outside and many have more than one car and the hail battered the cars and now they’re trying to pay for that too.
‘If you own a business and that got hit now you’re waiting on that insurance and not running it until it’s fixed.
‘Then you have landlords that didn’t do repairs after the storm on their rentals.’
Damages inside homes became even worse after windows busted in, and the bad weather followed, flooding houses and ruining property
Meanwhile, the Cozad area has had 45 reports of hail by trained spotters and has been under severe weather warnings 30 times during the past 12 months, according to the Interactive Hail Map.
Doppler radar has also detected hail at or near Cozad on 107 occasions ove that time period.
‘Insurance companies don’t wanna touch you because we have this bad weather,’ McKeown said.
‘If you want it you have to pay.
‘They’ve got you. Your hands are tied.’
