Tropical Cyclone Debbie has hit the property insurance market with $1,740 million in losses, according to PERILS’ fourth and final estimate for the category-four system that battered Queensland and NSW from March 28, 2017 until the early part of April.
The figure compares to the catastrophe data company’s third loss estimate of $1,658 million, which was issued six months after the event, on September 28.
PERILS said Tropical Cyclone Debbie is the first Australian cat event for which a market loss footprint is available at a postcode level and by property line of business. The data has also been divided into losses classified as “cyclone” and those classified as “flood.”
“This final footprint for Debbie has again been produced by collecting detailed loss data from affected insurance companies,” said Darryl Pidcock, head of PERILS Asia-Pacific. “The coverage and quality of this information has enabled us to create an accurate loss picture for what was a complex storm, impacting a wide area with flood and wind, and resulting in materially different impacts over the affected areas. This real data also enables subscribers to validate their model assumptions.”
Complementing the loss footprint information were postcode-level gust-speed values sourced from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and Risk Frontiers; and postcode-level rain intensity measures provided by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). This data allows subscribers to validate vulnerability functions in probabilistic cat models with actual, high-quality, independent market data.
