While inland flooding complicates the picture of still-to-be-determined insured loss estimates from Hurricane Helene, a weather forecasting firm has already delivered a second estimate of total damages, with numbers approaching those of Hurricanes Ian, Harvey and Sandy.

AccuWeather has increased its range of estimates for Hurricane Helene’s total damage and economic loss—including insured and uninsured losses—to $145 billion to $160 billion, up $50 billion on both ends from an earlier estimated range of $95 billion to $110 billion. AccuWeather explained that the preliminary estimate came as Helene’s most significant impacts were still occurring.

“The increase reflects the additional, grim damage reports received over the past 48 hours and makes Hurricane Helene one of the costliest storms in United States history because of the devastating storm surge, damaging winds and historic flooding,” AccuWeather said in a media statement. In the statement, AccuWeather set forth comparative estimates to other impactful U.S. storms in recent history (adjusted for inflation), starting with Hurricane Ian in 2022. AccuWeather put Ian’s total in the $180-$210 billion range, also listing Hurricane Harvey with a $190 billion estimate and Superstorm Sandy at $210 billion.

Explaining the $50 billion jump in its Helene estimate since last week, AccuWeather said catastrophic flooding in the southern Appalachians including Asheville, N.C., and widespread storm surge impacts along the populated west coast Florida cities, such as Tampa Bay, were significant contributing factors

Those storm surge impacts, AccuWeather said, “were truly historic with numerous tide gauges reporting storm surges of 6-10 feet, and many new all-time records being set….”

“This was a key part of the estimate of total damage and economic loss because of the high-valued properties in these areas that sustained significant water damage,” AccuWeather stated.

Beyond the extensive damage to high-end coastal real estate and businesses, AccuWeather noted that storm impacts included flight cancellations, airport and school closures. In the southern Appalachians, roads washed out. And much of western North Carolina was shut down as flood waters made entire communities inaccessible.

Overall, AccuWeather’s range of estimates accounts for damage to homes, businesses, medical facilities, roadways and vehicles, as well as power outages, which results in food spoilage and interruption to medical care. Encompassing both insured and uninsured losses, it includes damage to property, job and wage losses, crops, infrastructure damage, interruption of the supply chain, auxiliary business losses and flight delays.

The estimated damage range also accounts for the costs of evacuations, relocations, emergency management and the extraordinary government expenses for cleanup operations and the long-term effects on business logistics, transportation and tourism as well as the health effects and the medical and other expenses of deaths and injuries.

As a result, AccuWeather estimates “can sometimes be multiples of estimates released by other sources,” the media statement said, noting that other estimators are less comprehensive in their evaluations of damage and economic impact.

In fact, AccuWeather’s current low-end estimate of $145 billion is more than four-times a high-end estimate of lost economic output and property damage published by Moody’s Analytics on Friday of $34 billion. Specifically, Moody’s put the dollar value of lost output— “the inability of firms and workers to contribute to the economy” stemming from power outages and closures—at $5-$8 billion, noting that those losses will be felt into the third and fourth quarters even if normalcy returns to the affected regions this week.

Moody’s has also initially pegged the property damage cost at $15 billion to $26 billion, weighing the downward effects of less expensive housing and fewer homes in the area where Helene made landfall—Florida’s Big Bend—against the wide footprint of the storm across several states.

Most of the cost will come from milder damage that spans Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and includes some major population centers, Adam Kamins, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics, wrote in last week’s commentary.

Still, he said, “It remains far too early to assign a precise cost to Helene,” promising that a more finely tuned estimate of insured losses will be released in the coming weeks by Moody’s RMS Event Response.

Hurricane Helene is generating potentially significant losses for property/casualty insurers—mainly in homeowners and commercial property lines, and to a lesser extent in automobile and marine lines, Moody’s Ratings advised in a separate insurance sector comment published on Sunday, reiterating that it will take weeks or months for insurers to have reliable estimates of incurred losses.

Separately, on Friday, risk modeler CoreLogic published a preliminary estimate of insured wind and storm surge losses in the range of $3-$5 billion. CoreLogic predicted that those losses would be split evenly between Florida and Georgia. CoreLogic noted that there was significant uncertainty in this first estimate due to the wind field and stated that the firm is continuing to monitor the event.

Importantly, CoreLogic’s range does not consider losses for precipitation-induced inland flooding and excludes losses to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Included are losses related to damage to buildings, contents, and business interruption for residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural property.

CoreLogic’s estimate also does not include damage to offshore property.

Another risk modeler, Verisk, reported that modeling of wind, storm surge and inland flood impacts from Helene have been in progress since Friday, and that a set of custom scenarios for Helene’s wind and storm surge impacts is set to be released on Wednesday, Oct. 2, including Touchstone and Touchstone Re event sets, loss based similar stochastic events, and median modeled wind and storm surge shapefiles. An official industry loss estimate, however, will not be provided on Wednesday given the significant proportion of insured loss likely to stem from inland flooding.

Verisk said the insured industry loss estimate for all three perils would be forthcoming once its modeling of Helene’s precipitation-induced flooding is complete, but that the timing for release is still to be determined.

Worse Than Idalia

In initial commentaries released Friday, rating agencies AM Best and Fitch Ratings each took a first stab at pegging insurance industry loss totals for Hurricane Helene, with Fitch putting an insured loss range of $5-$10 billion on the event and AM Best forecasting something in excess of $5 billion.

Related article: Primary Insurers Will Absorb $5B+ Hurricane Helene Losses: Rating Agencies

AM Best said the $5 billion was derived by making a comparison to Hurricane Idalia, which struck the sparsely populated area of Florida’s Big Bend region in August 2023, causing insured losses in the range of $2.5-4 billion (according to Verisk). “Helene’s strong wind fields stretched over a much wider area, accompanied by coastal storm surge and inland flooding,” said Jason Hopper, associate director, AM Best.

The landfalls of Idalia and Helen “were within a few dozen miles of one another, both in a relatively sparsely populated area. But the similarities mostly end there, and Helene is poised to carry a heftier economic price tag,” agreed Kamins of Moody’s Analytics in his writeup. “Unlike Idalia, Helene sustained its Category 4 status long enough to bring higher winds and more severe storm surges to Florida. Tampa and St. Petersburg dealt with record-breaking surges that unleashed significant flooding.”

Kamins noted that another significant difference was Helene’s larger size, covering a wider swath of the Southeast after weakening to a tropical storm.

CoreLogic noted that Helene’s radius of maximum wind was nearly 35 miles, making it comparable to the size of 2005 Hurricane Katrina.

Making landfall roughly 6 miles northwest of where Hurricane Idalia struck in 2022, and about 22 miles northwest of Debby’s landfall on Aug. 5 this year, CoreLogic noted that the landfall pattern highlights how areas in the region “can be exposed to compound risk.”

Commenting on the historic flooding that Helene brought to the southern Appalachians, AccuWeather also drew a comparison to earlier catastrophic events. “Pictures and video from the scene, as limited as those reports have been due to ongoing major communication infrastructure damage, suggest one of the worst flooding disasters in United States history, with tragically striking similarities in damage to other catastrophic floods such as flooding associated with Hurricane Katrina, the flooding from Hurricane Harvey and the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Floods of 1889 and 1977.

Immediate and Long-Term Impacts

“This is a tremendous humanitarian disaster with many people in urgent need of critical help,” said AccuWeather’s Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter. “People really need to understand how serious this flooding has been and the tragic degree of human suffering ongoing now, which may get even worse without proper supplies and infrastructure in the coming days, so that the country can mobilize resources to rescue people in danger from injuries sustained or the lack of critical supplies.”

Looking out over the long term, Kamins suggested a looming impact emanating from the combination of having a severe hurricane slam into Florida’s Gulf Coast for the third straight year and the escalating cost of insurance in the state. “Although climate hazards alone tend not to compel residents to move out of an area, further increases in insurance premiums might,” he said. “Significant changes in the next year or two are improbable, but the corrosive impact on housing affordability in the Sunshine State looks like an ever-growing risk.”

As for the impacts on individual insurers, Moody’s Ratings said in its sector comment that insurers most exposed to the storm are “Florida-only carriers,” defining the term to mean insurance companies with at least 75 percent of their homeowners and commercial property premiums written in the state. “The top 10 Florida-only insurers write about 50 percent of the state’s homeowners business and are more vulnerable than others given their geographic concentration,” Moody’s said, noting that while large national homeowners insurers are also exposed, the nationals carefully monitor their exposures and benefit from geographic diversification across the nation.

“Florida-only companies manage their hurricane exposure by purchasing extensive property- catastrophe reinsurance, which exposes their claims-paying ability to counterparty credit risk from reinsurers following a large storm,” Moody’s said.

Moody’s reported that the state’s insurers of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation (A1 review for upgrade) is the largest Florida-only insurer. “With $15 billion of readily available claims-paying resources, Citizens is well-positioned to manage the losses from Hurricane Helene,” Moody’s rating analysts wrote, also noting that Citizens is less concentrated in the Big Bend region—the location of the eye of the storm—than other areas of the Florida coast.

The analysts’ report lists the top 10 Florida-only homeowners carriers, the top 10 national carriers writing homeowners in Florida and the top 10 carriers writing commercial property insurance in Florida (a mix of national and Florida-only companies).