Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility: No payouts from Sandy

The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) has published a report suggesting that hurricane Sandy has not triggered the facility for any of its member countries. Three members were hit by Sandy, with Jamaica being first, then Haiti was impacted by Sandy’s rains and finally the Bahamas was next in Sandy’s path. The CCRIF says after initial model runs it does not look like Sandy has tripped any of the members policies parametric triggers.

Despite the fact that Haiti has the highest death toll from Sandy they do not qualify for assessment as the island was outside of the modelled wind field. With so much damage caused by rainfall induced flooding and landslides again, Haiti is really in need of the long awaited CCRIF excess rainfall product.

Both Jamaica and the Bahamas were within  the modelled wind field and so Sandy qualifies as an event under the terms of their parametric policies. The CCRIF then run their models to find out whether any payouts are due or not.

The CCRIF said that preliminary runs of its loss model generated modest government losses in the two affected countries (Jamaica and the Bahamas), but in both cases the estimate was below the parametric trigger level and therefore no payout is due. For Jamaica, the modelled government loss for Sandy had a return period of around 6 years, while in the Bahamas it was about a once in 2 year loss event.

The CCRIF said that initial assessment of on-the-ground impacts indicates that government losses from wind and storm surge appear to be consistent with their model outputs.