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June hailstorms cost insurers more than $3 billion: Aon

Posted On: Jul. 10, 2018 12:17 PM CST

June hailstorms cost insurers more than $3 billion: Aon

U.S. hailstorms in June could cost insurers more than $3 billion, according to the latest catastrophe report released Tuesday by Aon P.L.C.’s Impact Forecasting unit.

Hail and damaging straight-line winds rocked areas in the Rockies, Plains, Midwest, Southeast, and the Northeast, the report said, with Colorado among the hardest hit as separate major hailstorms struck the metro areas of Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs.

Combined economic losses from all the events are expected to approach $4 billion, with insurers “poised to cover more than $3 billion of the economic cost,” Impact Forecasting said in its Global Catastrophe Recap June 2018 report.

Globally, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake hit Japan’s Osaka Prefecture on June 18, destroying or damaging nearly 30,000 structures. Some 78,838 claims had already been filed with payouts listed at 13.7 billion yen ($125 million), according to the General Insurance Association of Japan.

“Overall economic losses will be much higher,” Impact said of the Osaka earthquake in its report.

China’s Yangtze River Basin saw flooding from seasonal rainfall and convective storms with aggregate seasonal damages now estimated by China’s National Commission for Disaster Reduction at more than $1 billion as Tropical Storm Ewiniar brought another $570 million of estimated economic losses to China and Vietnam, the report said.

Severe weather including wind and hail across Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Austria and elsewhere caused insured and economic losses “expected to reach” into the tens of millions of dollars, the report said.

“June was one of the most active months thus far in 2018 for natural disasters,” Michal Lorinc, a Slovak Republic-based analyst within Impact Forecasting’s Catastrophe Insight team, said in a statement issued with the report. “A plethora of major events occurred in many regions around the world during the month — notably in the United States, Japan, China and Europe — which has led to a multibillion-dollar economic toll.”