AIR Worldwide (AIR) announced an enhanced set of capabilities to help insurers, reinsurers, brokers, and risk managers to better assess the catastrophe risk to industrial facilities. The approach is applicable for estimating property and business interruption losses to a wide variety of industrial facilities due to hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural catastrophes.

"AIR conducts detailed, site-specific, engineering-based risk assessments for various types of industrial facilities through our Catastrophe Risk Engineering (CRE) services," says Dr. Akshay Gupta, principal engineer and director of the CRE practice at AIR Worldwide. "The in-depth knowledge gained from these assessments is now embedded in our catastrophe models to provide companies with a more detailed and complete view of risk to single facilities and large portfolios comprising a diverse set of facilities types and sizes."

Larger, more complex industrial sites comprise various components that may behave differently from one another when subject to the same hurricane wind speed or level of earthquake-induced ground shaking. For example, components such as flares, process towers, or cooling towers may sustain fairly significant damage at a particular wind speed, while pumps, transformers, or anchored tanks may remain almost unscathed.