2010: a year of costly disasters
Haiti on 12 January, killed more than 220,000 people. Only the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China claimed more lives (242,000). Whilst the earthquake in Haiti resulted in human tragedy on a staggering scale, it gave rise to only negligible losses for the insurance industry, as is so often the case in developing countries.
Five-hundred times more energy than in the Haiti quake was released by the earthquake that hit Chile just over a month later. With overall losses of $30 billion and insured losses of $8 billion, this quake was last year’s most expensive natural catastrophe. Chile is a highly developed country with very strict building codes to take account of the high earthquake exposure. As a result, there were comparatively few human casualties, despite the severity of the quake — the fifth-strongest ever measured — although people were killed in Chile, too.
In the summer, floods following extreme monsoon rainfall had devastating consequences in Pakistan. For weeks, up to one-quarter of the country was flooded. Countless people lost all their worldly possessions. The overall loss totaled $9.5 billion — an extremely high amount for Pakistan’s emerging economy.
A wide-scale catastrophe also resulted from the heat wave in Russia and neighboring countries between July and September. Many places, including Moscow, experienced record temperatures. In some regions of central Russia, they exceeded 30°C for two months on end. Forests burned, with the fires threatening nuclear facilities and areas where the ground had been contaminated by radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. At least 56,000 people died as a result of heat and air pollution, making it the most deadly natural disaster in Russia’s history.
Hurricane season in the North Atlantic: Lucky escape
The hurricane season in the North Atlantic was benign — but only at first glance. Favorable weather patterns meant that the U.S. coast was not hit by a single hurricane. In Mexico, however, a few storms caused substantial damage. Otherwise, the tropical cyclones turned away in a northeasterly direction over the sea, only grazing some islands in the Caribbean.
What appeared benign, however, was, in terms of the number and intensity of the storms, one of the severest hurricane seasons of the past 100 years. Altogether, there were nineteen named tropical cyclones, equaling the number recorded in 1995 and putting 2010 in joint third place after 2005 (28) and 1933 (21). Twelve of the storms attained hurricane strength, with five of these falling into the top hurricane
