Steve Evans, Artemis, vom 3. November 2017

The insurance and reinsurance industry loss estimate for recent European windstorm Herwart is rising, with Aon’s catastrophe risk modeling arm Impact Forecasting putting the industry impact from the storm that hit northern Germany and parts of central Europe at EUR 300 million (approx US $350 million).

Earlier this week we revealed that actuarial firm Meyerthole Siems Kohlruss (MSK) estimated that the loss to German insurance interests would be EUR 250 million.

Storm Herwart impacted Germany last Sunday, particularly affecting the Hamburg area with hurricane speed wind gusts, a storm surge and torrential rainfall all impacting the region.
Herwart is the third windstorm of the year to have caused a loss to insurance and reinsurance interests of more than 100 million euros, MSK had said. But storm Herwart is expected to be the most expensive extra-tropical storm to hit Germany in 2017, after Egon in January, Thomas in February and Xavier in early October, MSK said.

Aon’s Impact Forecasting unit believes the ultimate loss to insurance and reinsurance interests will be higher, pegging them at EUR 300 million on a preliminary basis.
Windstorm Herwart saw wind gusts that exceeded those generated by windstorm Xavier in Germany in early October, a storm which is expected to cause losses of up to EUR 200 million (US $232 million) for the local insurance market, Impact Forecasting said.

Herwart has also impacted the Czech Republic, with even insurance companies reporting over 17,600 claims, estimated at a minimum to be another US $23 million, as of November 1st.
The expectation is that those numbers will increase and around 30,000 claims will be reported in the Czech Republic, costing insurers US $41 million and Herwart could be the worst windstorm for the Czech insurance industry since 2007’s Kyrill and 2008’s Emma.

Insurers in Hungary have also reported claims from windstorm Herwart, with 3,200 claims expected to add over a million dollars to the total. In Hungary, windstorm Herwart is known as storm Narcisz.

So add some loss creep in and growth of the Germany estimate, which was very preliminary and it’s easy to see that windstorm Herwart will likely exceed EUR 300 million in insurance and reinsurance industry losses.

Primary insurers and large commercial insurers will likely take the bulk of the loss, with a small amount filtering through to some exposed reinsurance contracts.