The total damage inflicted by Hurricane Irene may reach $7 billion by the time the storm dissipates in the coming days, making one of the insurance industry’s worst years even tougher, according to an early estimate by Kinetic Analysis Corp. in Silver Spring, Md.
Most of the loss will likely come from property in New York and New Jersey, according to industry experts. Those two states have the most valuable coastal property on the Atlantic Coast.
At $7 billion in possible losses, Irene would be among the 10 costliest catastrophes in U.S. history, according to the Insurance Information Institute. The most expensive disaster by far was Hurricane Katrina, which caused $45 billion worth of damage. The second was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, which the institute counts as a single event, at about $23 billion.
