The number of carriers announcing substantial revisions to their initial insurance loss estimates from Hurricane Ike now totals 11, Guy Carpenter reported.

The latest to come forward are Swiss Re Group and Aspen Insurance Holdings Ltd. Swiss Re has increased its estimates by 64 percent, and Aspen upped its estimate by 23 percent.

David Flandro, Guy Carpenter senior vice president, said, “In terms of insured losses of this magnitude, this has to be among those with the greatest variance between the initial estimate and actual outcome.”

He said the disparity is due primarily to the breadth of the storm being wider than usual and the trajectory going further into the country than initially assumed.”

Zurich, Switzerland-based Swiss Re's revised dollar loss, converted from Swiss francs, rose from $307 million $503 million.

Guy Carpenter said it believes yet more details may be disclosed when Swiss Re announces its full-year 2008 results Feb. 19.

Bermuda-based Aspen's gross loss estimate moved from $182 million to $223 million.

Most of this increase, Guy Carpenter said, came from the carrier's international insurance and property reinsurance segments.

Other carriers that have come in with revised Ike losses are: Argo, Transatlantic, PartnerRe, Arch, IPC, Platinum, Validus, Chaucer and Advent.

Hurricane Ike struck the United States on Sept. 13 on the Texas Gulf Coast as a Category 2 storm with winds of 110 mph.

Guy Carpenter has attributed some of the revisions in losses to the complexity of modeling for, and the difficulty in assessing marine losses–particularly off-shore energy installations, where underwater damage may not be immediately visible.

In addition, in a rare weather event, the hurricane was downgraded for a period before it linked up with an extra-tropical cyclone in Ohio and regained destructive power. During that lull, industry segments that tally catastrophic damage lost track of the storm.

Last month Property Claim Services, a unit of Jersey City, N.J.-based Insurance Services Office, which generally produces authoritative estimates of catastrophe losses, said it was evaluating whether to include offshore properties in its catastrophe estimates.

PCS has increased its Ike loss estimate to $10.655 billion, which would make it the fifth most costly hurricane in U.S. history. The original estimate was $8.1 billion.

Other estimates that include offshore damage have put the loss figure as high as $30 billion.

Special Reports /

More Ike Loss Revisions Arrive

Related Stories

Recommended For You