Ike Preliminary Damage Estimates In

Seen on the newswire:

Hurricane Ike, which blasted the densely populated Texas coast and swept through Houston on Saturday, could trigger insurance claims between $8 billion and $18 billion, according to early estimates of the damage.

Tom Larsen, a senior vice-president with EQECAT Inc, which helps insurers model catastrophe risk, told Reuters that from data he had seen so far, the cost of damage was likely to fall in the middle of that range.

Another risk modeling firm, AIR Worldwide, said the expected loss to insurers from onshore damage was around $10 billion.

Although the storm was bad enough, particularly to those folks in places like Crystal Beach, who tried to ride out the storm and learned about storm surge the hard way…it could have been much worse.