Gloria Gonzalez

9/18/2018 7:00:00 AM

Source: Business Insurance

The extent of the insured damage caused by Hurricane Florence is still unclear, but some experts are drawing parallels to Hurricane Harvey because, like that storm, Florence is a multiday rainfall event, while others caution against such comparisons.

Florence made landfall on Friday morning and stalled across North and South Carolina, and its remnants continue to deliver record-breaking rainfall, dropping 36 inches on North Carolina and nearly 24 inches in South Carolina as of Monday evening.

Insured losses from what is now tropical depression Florence will total about $2.5 billion, according to an estimate Monday from Boston-based catastrophe modeler Karen Clark & Co.

“It’s not going to be as much the traditional wind,” said Michael Korn, leader of Integro Insurance Brokers’ property practice based in San Francisco. “It’s going to be about all the water that Florence is going to dump onto the land. As we saw in Harvey, that makes you start to think about how does each policy handle windstorm? How does each policy handle flood? Where does storm surge belong in a policy? There’s no one size fits all.”