Hurricanes “Helene” and “Milton” caused a combined insured loss of between $35 billion and $55 billion in the southeastern United States. Moody’s RMS published this estimate. If there were damage at the upper end of the forecast, it would be almost too high, like the insured damage from all natural catastrophes worldwide in the first half of the year combined. Here, the reinsurer Munich Re put the insured losses at 62 billion euros.
Hurricanes “Helene” and “Milton” made landfall within a short distance of each other on the west coast of Florida. Helene made landfall on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico on September 27 as a category four hurricane, the second highest category, with wind speeds of 225 kilometers per hour. Milton followed on the night of October 10th with wind speeds of 195 kilometers per hour as a Category 3 storm, also on the west coast of Florida.
Two storms in one place
There are areas that were equally affected by both storms, which makes it more difficult to delineate the insured damage and thus also the claims from the insurers to the reinsurers, says Mohsen Rahnama, who is responsible for risk model analysis at Moody’s. In addition to strong winds, both storms also brought flooding from torrential rain. In the run-up to Milton, there were also tornadoes in southern and central Florida, which also caused extensive damage.
According to Rahnama, uncertainties in the damage calculation lie, among other things, in coverage gaps between events. For example, if buildings were damaged by “Helene” for which they are not or only insufficiently insured, such as flooding, “Milton” but also storm damage that is insured, insurers would also have to cover damage that is actually not insured to a certain extent.
Moody’s had estimated the insured losses from “Helene” at 8 to 14 billion and will also provide an estimate for losses from Hurricane “Milton” later this week. However, the latter probably cost significantly fewer lives. The death toll is given as 23. Hurricane Helene killed 232 people.
