The Insurance Council of Australia says 11,366 claims have been lodged in relation to wild weather that swept across NSW and the ACT.

Electrical storms struck late on January 15, bringing down trees and powerlines, before gale-force winds arrived two days later.

The vast majority of claims (10,797) were from NSW. Some 9918 were home claims, 1059 were motor, and 389 commercial.

Suncorp says it has deployed its Mobile Disaster Response Hub to northern NSW. The insurer says it has received 3200 storm-related claims.

“This marks the first operational use of our hubs since their completion in November last year, providing an additional layer of support for customers in their time of need,” executive manager disaster management Lilly Broodbank said.

“We were able to pinpoint the most impacted communities from our Disaster Management Centre in Brisbane, allowing us to deploy customer support teams, builders and assessors to ensure those affected receive the assistance they need.”

The hub offers face-to-face access to a specialist customer support team, as well as the ability to power up devices and connect through Wi-Fi accessibility.

The NSW government says power has been restored to around 300,000 homes and businesses, and crews are working hard to connect the remaining 8600. Some outages are expected to continue into this week due to severe damage in isolated locations.

Government assistance was announced over the weekend through the Commonwealth-State Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA).  

The assistance includes grants for low income, uninsured residents to replace lost essential household items to maintain basic standards of living, and to undertake essential structural repairs to restore homes to a safe and habitable condition.