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US insurances losses from Hurricane Hanna will not top $400M: RMS

Posted On: Jul. 30, 2020 2:33 PM CST

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U.S. insurance losses from Hurricane Hanna will not exceed $400 million, Risk Management Solutions Inc. said Thursday.

The estimate includes insured losses associated with wind and storm surge, including losses to the National Flood Insurance Program, the Newark, California-based catastrophe modeler said in a statement.

This includes property damage and business interruption from wind and storm surge-driven coastal flooding to residential, commercial, industrial and automobile lines of business and wind-driven damage to offshore platforms in the western Gulf of Mexico, which is expected to be a small fraction of the overall insured loss.

Losses associated with inland flooding are expected to be negligible because the storm maintained its forward motion after landfall and only caused high rainfall totals in isolated areas.

RMS expects losses to the NFIP to represent approximately $100 million or less of the total insured loss estimate, the statement said.

“The storm made landfall in southern Texas as a Category 1 hurricane with stronger winds than expected. However, the impacted region is an area with low industry exposure,” Jeff Waters, senior product manager, RMS North Atlantic Hurricane Models, said in the statement.

Hurricane Hanna was the eighth named storm of the 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season and the earliest eighth named storm on record, the statement said. It made landfall on July 25 on Padre Island, Texas, as a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph.