ICAT Damage Estimator: Hurricanes Can Cause Big Damage in July

BOULDER, Colo. (Map) - BOULDER, Colo., July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Today marks the four-year anniversary of Hurricane Dennis, a Category 3 storm that slammed into the panhandle of Florida with sustained winds of 120 m.p.h.

While Dennis inflicted over $2.2 billion in damage in 2005 and was the first storm to make landfall in what was an historically active and destructive hurricane season, it was not the most damaging hurricane to make landfall in July.

On July 5, 1916 the "Middle Gulf Coast" hurricane made landfall near the Alabama/Mississippi border as a Category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds of 120 m.p.h. The storm surge in Mobile, AL was measured at almost 12 feet, and water inundated the entire business district. If this storm were to strike in 2009 it would cause an estimated $13.8 billion in damage - more than five times that of Dennis - based on calculations from the ICAT Damage Estimator website. This amount of damage is comparable to Hurricane Frances ($11.8 billion) that struck Florida in 2004 or Hurricane Rita ($11.3 billion) that struck Texas and Louisiana in 2005.

Please point to www.ICATDamageEstimator.com to explore this new and informative website.

The ICAT Damage Estimator website provides simple access to each of the 235 tropical storms and hurricanes that made landfall in the United States from 1900-2008, and answers the question: 'How much damage would these storms cause if they made landfall today, in 2009?'

"ICAT is excited to offer this unique website as a useful tool for media sources, public officials, the scientific and academic community, the insurance and reinsurance industries, and other interested individuals," said Jack Graham, Chairman and CEO of ICAT Holdings.

This recently launched website calculates changes from inflation, increased wealth, and increased population density to estimate damages as if previous storms made landfall in 2009. The site is interactive and map-based, and allows visitors to get an up-to-date understanding of storm damages based on current social trends.

In addition to delivering information by storm name, year and category, the website also allows users to zoom in and select specific portions of the U.S. coastline to extract the historical record of storms making landfall in the selected region, and to calculate the current loss estimates of the identified storms. The website will also track all active storms during the 2009 Hurricane Season.

For media users, there is one-click export functionality, allowing users to view the storms in Google Earth and to perform calculations on the storm data in a spreadsheet.

The website is best viewed using the Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, or Google Chrome browsers. Internet Explorer can be used as well but may be somewhat slower to load the Google Map visualization.

Please stay tuned to our blog (http://www.ICATDamageEstimator.com/damageblog) for regular updates through the season and damage estimates when storms in 2009 threaten the U.S. coastline.

About ICAT

ICAT was founded in 1998 to provide catastrophe insurance coverage to businesses throughout the United States and homeowners in Hawaii. The scope of our business activities has broadened significantly but we remain committed to our original vision: We are a highly specialized and disciplined underwriter of catastrophe insurance.

We operate in all states that are immediately proximate to the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, Hawaii, and in all states that carry a material exposure to earthquake events. For more information, please see www.icat.com.