Hurricane Ian is Once Again Teaching Us That: Every Storm Is Different

One of the big lessons we need to learn from Hurricane Ian is that no two storms or hurricanes are ever the same. Every storm has a unique fingerprint. Some are vaguely familiar with other storms, having similar characteristics, but each storm has its own distinct set of characteristics that set it apart from every other storm ever to have occurred.

We do not have to go back too far in time to see this human bias play out with life and death consequences. Back in 2011,?Irene?came onto land in New Jersey with much hype about wind and surge potential. That hype never materialized for the people of New York and New Jersey. (Irene instead dumped devastating precipitation in upstate New York and Vermont cause catastrophic inland flooding!)

Fast forward a year and in October 2012,?Hurricane Sandy?came barreling towards the mid-Atlantic and New York. Because the hype of Irene did not match the reality, many decisions were made with Sandy that ended up being disastrous. Countless people decided to stay because just the year before, they evacuated due to Irene, only to see no impact. With Sandy though, the storm was different. Different enough to push a wall of water 5-10 feet into low lying areas of New York and New Jersey. People were trapped in their homes and cars. Many died.

Down in Florida, similar parallels are being drawn with Hurricane Ian. Residents in Southwest Florida have vivid memories of?Hurricane Irma?in 2019. For some long-timers, stories of?Hurricane Charley?exist. The stories are the same. Irma in particular generated none of the threatening storm surge that was predicted for SW Florida. A Surge of 10 feet was estimated from Marco Island, up to Naples and Fort Myers. But the storms path meant that the winds were cycling from the shore outwards towards the Gulf of Mexico in that area. Water was actually be pushed away from the coast. Like with Sandy, the stories are beginning to emerge in Naples, Fort Myers, Sanibel Island and Captiva Island of those who ignored warnings to evacuate. Those that had survived Irma and felt shielded from the affects. As it seems to happen in storms like this, we are often fooled by the randomness.

Why Each Storm is Different

Hurricanes are highly random constructs of nature. The key variables that go into defining a hurricane are:

1. Central barometric pressure
2. the width or radius of maximum winds
3. storm track
4. forward track velocity
5. angle of impact

No storm will have each of these parameters neatly the same. And it is these minor deviations that make an Irene different from a Sandy, an Irma different from an Ian. It is one of the reasons why we use computer models instead of actuarial loss data to insure hurricanes. We need to examine as many possible random variations of storms to fully capture the risk associated with the peril. It gets even more complex if the our base expectations of the randomness is changing with the climate.

For a typical insurance company, they may run between 10,000 and 100,000 simulations of hurricane activity to get enough sample size to be confident in its underwriting and pricing. And even that level of analysis may fail to uncover the perfect monster storm where the worst of all the parameters that make a hurricane a monster, all randomly line up. Storms that we have never historically seen and can’t even imagine occurring. An example we often use is, what if, a Category 5 hurricane makes landfall in New York City? It has never happened, we don’t know if it is even physically possible, but we do know that the consequences of such a storm would be biblical. This is why computer models are so important in the analysis of hurricanes and property damage.

This is one of the elements of risk transparency Green Shield is looking to disrupt. By making complex data and analytics available to property owners (and the brokers who work with them), and translating those analytics into insightful and actionable decisions, property owners will have the upper hand versus nature.

Summary - ?? No two storms are ever the same.

No two storms are identical. Every storm is different. In order to get the upper hand on nature, we need to use modern computerized technology to simulate what nature can bring to our doorsteps. With insights comes resiliency!