The pattern of severe weather that began in early March has caused billions of dollars in damage and dozens of deaths, state officials and industry experts said.

The NOAA's National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center said that between March 28 and April 8 there were 1,800 reports of hailstorms and 217 tornado sightings running as far west as Kansas and Oklahoma, eastward through Louisiana to Iowa and through South Carolina.

The worst periods of tornado activity, according to the National Weather Service, were March 30 through April 2, with 118 sightings, and April 6-8, with 97 sightings.

The storms claimed at least 30 lives, according to reports, primarily in Tennessee, the center of storm activity.

President Bush has declared several counties in Missouri and Tennessee disaster areas or designated for disaster assistance.

Companies report claims are numbering in the thousands.

Bloomington, Ill.-based State Farm, the number-one insurer in both Tennessee and Missouri, has registered over 13,000 claims in Tennessee alone, said Crystal Loveridge, a spokeswoman for State Farm in the region.

From the April 6-8 events the company has received 8,500 auto and homeowners claims so far, she said. The total for the March 31-to-April 3 period comes to 4,965 auto and homeowners claims for Tennessee and Kentucky, largely in Tennessee, she said.

In Missouri, John Wisecaver, a spokesman for State Farm, said an April 2 tornado struck northeast Arkansas before heading into Missouri, inflicting widespread damage. In Missouri there were 3,400 homeowners' claims and 1,200 auto, while in Arkansas there were 600 homeowners and 1,100 auto claims. He said the lower number of homeowners claims did not reflect the extent of the destruction in the state because of its rural nature.

One town, Marmaduke, Ark., was destroyed by the April 2 tornado, he noted. Fortunately, no one was killed in the town of 1,100 residents.

“A small community like that can get lost in the equation,” he pointed out. “Whether it's one loss or zero, it can be an incredibly impacting event. It's a very, very sad thing to see.”

Ken Muth, spokesman for American Family Insurance, based in Madison, Wis., the second-largest insurer in Missouri, said the company has recorded 50,000 claims for both homeowners and auto insurance since February and has more than 500 adjusters working throughout the state and into Illinois and parts of Indiana around Indianapolis.

He said last year was a relatively mild one for the Midwest for storm claims, but this year is more than making up for it.

“We have had a whole year's worth of [storm claims] in one month so far,” he noted.

Joe Anderson, assistant vice president of property claims for Columbia, Tenn.-based Tennessee Farmers Insurance Company, the state's second largest insurer of homeowners insurance, said that for the two week storm period, the company was looking at approximately 20,000 claims totaling approximately $90 to $100 million. He cautioned that the figure could still come in at less than the estimate.

A spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance said it is still too soon to estimate the cost of loss from the tornadoes, which first hit April 2-3.

She said it took some time before claims adjusters could get into the affected region, and roads are impassable for the moment where tornadoes struck middle Tennessee. She added it would be several months before the state could gather some statistics.

According to the National Weather Service, the biggest outbreak of tornadoes occurred April 3-4 in 1974, when 147 tornadoes touched down in 13 states, killing 310 and injuring 5,454 in the United States and killing eight and injuring 23 Canada.

The record number of tornadoes is 543 in May 2003.