Hurricane Hugo

The Allstate Insurance Co. said yesterday that it expected to face $1.2 billion in damage claims from Hurricane Andrew, a surprisingly high figure that is more than four times what the company paid out for Hurricane Hugo in 1989.An official insurance industry organization that specializes in estimating the costs of disasters has placed the total insured losses in Florida and Louisiana at about $8 billion, or nearly twice what Hurricane Hugo cost.Allstate said that after its reinsurers paid about $200 million of the loss and its after-tax write-offs were considered, it would have to pay out about $700 million because of Hurricane Andrew.

STERLING, Va. -- Barbara Watson took a steamy cup of coffee into the war room of the National Weather Service and stared into a bank of monitors.When she sat down and picked up a phone at 7 a.m., one of her legs began to bounce.Moving pictures of a hurricane had just become a bloody wound over Wilmington, N.C.She thought: Hazel. Andrew. Dennis. Floyd. For a good emergency warning coordinator must think first of past storm surges, disasters and tidal waves.Around the room, conversations with amateur ham radio operators, state and county officials from mid-Atlantic emergency centers, and other weather forecasters hummed.

Estimates of the damage from Hurricane Andrew, still churning its way toward Louisiana and Texas, exceed $15 billion already, and Maryland insurers fear a repeat of the catastrophic level of losses they experienced from Hugo two years ago.Dade County, Fla., emergency workers were estimating today the hurricane had caused between $15 billion and $20 billion in damage to the south Florida coast.Maryland insurers, including GEICO Corp. of Chevy Chase, and Baltimore's USF&G Corp., said they have established emergency locations in South Florida and sent teams of insurance adjusters to the devastated areas.

Maya Ryan is having a blast, horseback riding in the surf with her mom and exploring coral reefs with her dad, an expert diver. She's even made friends with a local octupus.But 7-year -old Maya isn't on vacation. Such adventures are part of her normal routine, along with school and dance lessons.Flash back to before Maya was born. Kevin and Suzanne Ryan, in their early 30s, are exhausted. Suzanne works all night running an Irish pub in suburban New York, arriving home just as Kevin is leaving for his construction business.

WASHINGTON -- Hurricane Andrew poses a daunting test for the agency that coordinates federal disaster relief programs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was criticized for its lack of preparation in responding to Hurricane Hugo and the earthquake in Northern California three years ago.Acknowledging that the agency was overwhelmed by the back-to-back disasters in 1989, officials of the agency yesterday outlined a broad effort to ship in food,...

Hurricane Andrew killed more than 50 people, flattened tens of thousands of homes and scarred great swathes of South Florida and the Bayou Country. But Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski is determined it won't topple her.Faster than one could tack plywood over windows, Senator Mikulski was hastily erecting a barrier of rhetoric around herself to blunt criticism over her role with the federal agency charged with responding to natural disasters.As head of the Senate appropriations subcommittee funding the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the senator could be vulnerable to criticism for the agency's confused response.

Naval reservists from all over the country have left Baltimore-Washington International Airport, destined ultimately for various Pacific bases, where they will fill in for active duty personnel who have been deployed to the Desert Shield operation in Saudi Arabia.Navy spokesmen said the Navy called up 739 reservists, 52 of them from the Baltimore area. The reservists are part of the Reserve Naval Mobile Construction Battalion-23, otherwise known as the Seabees, headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Va.They took off last evening for Los Angeles and will report to Port Hueneme, Calif.

The state was still reeling from the ravages of Hurricane Hugo II when Joe Guard noticed a heavy black sheen spreading across the Cabin Branch.A watchman at a Curtis Creek oil terminal, Guard notified company officials, who quickly determined that the storm had damaged the storage facility, spilling 100,000 gallons of petroleum into the storm drains and ultimately the creek.That was the scenario that began yesterday morning's mock oil spill -- a "scrimmage" for the state's Oil Spill Emergency Rescue team -- at the mouth of Curtis Creek and Cabin Branch.

As residents of Texas and Louisiana either fled or braced for the arrival of Hurricane Andrew yesterday, insurers in Maryland and around the nation began to fear the worst from one of the most destructive storms of the century.Emergency workers in south Florida, which suffered the first hit Monday, have estimated the damage there from Andrew will run between $15 billion and $20 billion, compared to $10 billion in damage from Hurricane Hugo in 1989.Insured losses could reach $4 billion in Florida alone, claims adjusters predicted, about the same amount of insured losses Hugo caused in its entirety.

Insurance and reinsurance companies in the United States and elsewhere expect to pay record sums that could exceed $8 billion for damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew.dTC Property and casualty insurers will pay an estimated $7.3 billioin claims to hurricane victims in Florida alone, trade industry officials told a conference in Miami, yesterday, citing figures from the Property Claim Service unit of American Insurance Services Group, in New York.The estimate does not include insured losses from Hurricane Andrew in Louisiana or other areas affected.

WILMINGTON, N.C. -- Osey Sanders knows it takes time and cooperation to pick up after a hurricane.Sanders is a Charleston, S.C., police officer. Since 1989, when his city was ravaged by Hurricane Hugo, he has volunteered for emergency duty after hurricanes in the Virgin Islands.He was in Homestead, Fla., after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and in Carolina Beach, N.C., after Hurricane Bertha this summer."Hopefully, if Charleston ever gets hit again, we'll be reciprocated in kind," he said.Sanders was one of 40 people from Charleston who arrived in town yesterday to lend a hand as New Hanover County, North Carolina's smallest county and the hardest hit in the latest storm, struggled to get a handle on the damage.

MIAMI -- The unpredictability of nature was on full display yesterday as an intensifying Hurricane Emily moved away from Florida and churned in the general direction of Charleston, S.C., which was ravaged four years ago by Hurricane Hugo."

Vacations don't always agree with Cliff and Kathy Hughes.Take their trip to St. Maarten. They envisioned themselves sipping daiquiris and catching some sun on a whitewashed beach. Instead they wound up trapped in a hotel lobby playing cards while Hurricane Hugo battered the island.Last spring, they gave the Caribbean another try, only to get caught in a political uprising.Ah, vacations. They're supposed to be blissful retreats where your only dilemma is whether to slather on SPF-10 or SPF-15.

The cost of insurance for homes and automobiles is expecte to rise 10 percent or more in some states, and perhaps become harder to obtain, as a result of the staggeringly high losses to insurers from Hurricane Andrew and other recent disasters.The losses this year, estimated at more than $10 billion, come after a number of difficult years for the property-casualty industry.And they come while lower interest rates are reducing the return on insurance companies' investments. Consequently many companies will experience cash shortages in the next 12 months and will be under pressure to raise rates, analysts and industry executives say.Nonetheless, consumer advocates say many insurance companies are far healthier than they would have the public believe and are trying to use the catastrophes as an excuse to gouge the public.

Hurricane Andrew killed more than 50 people, flattened tens of thousands of homes and scarred great swathes of South Florida and the Bayou Country. But Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski is determined it won't topple her.Faster than one could tack plywood over windows, Senator Mikulski was hastily erecting a barrier of rhetoric around herself to blunt criticism over her role with the federal agency charged with responding to natural disasters.As head of the Senate appropriations subcommittee funding the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the senator could be vulnerable to criticism for the agency's confused response.

The Allstate Insurance Co. said yesterday that it expected to face $1.2 billion in damage claims from Hurricane Andrew, a surprisingly high figure that is more than four times what the company paid out for Hurricane Hugo in 1989.An official insurance industry organization that specializes in estimating the costs of disasters has placed the total insured losses in Florida and Louisiana at about $8 billion, or nearly twice what Hurricane Hugo cost.Allstate said that after its reinsurers paid about $200 million of the loss and its after-tax write-offs were considered, it would have to pay out about $700 million because of Hurricane Andrew.

Maya Ryan is having a blast, horseback riding in the surf with her mom and exploring coral reefs with her dad, an expert diver. She's even made friends with a local octupus.But 7-year -old Maya isn't on vacation. Such adventures are part of her normal routine, along with school and dance lessons.Flash back to before Maya was born. Kevin and Suzanne Ryan, in their early 30s, are exhausted. Suzanne works all night running an Irish pub in suburban New York, arriving home just as Kevin is leaving for his construction business.

The cost of insurance for homes and automobiles is expecte to rise 10 percent or more in some states, and perhaps become harder to obtain, as a result of the staggeringly high losses to insurers from Hurricane Andrew and other recent disasters.The losses this year, estimated at more than $10 billion, come after a number of difficult years for the property-casualty industry.And they come while lower interest rates are reducing the return on insurance companies' investments. Consequently many companies will experience cash shortages in the next 12 months and will be under pressure to raise rates, analysts and industry executives say.Nonetheless, consumer advocates say many insurance companies are far healthier than they would have the public believe and are trying to use the catastrophes as an excuse to gouge the public.

Charleston, S.C.--The Andrew school of hurricane instruction is a hard school. It teaches hard lessons. If our leaders do not learn their lessons from this disaster, one day they will have to repeat them.In this regard, the city of Charleston could function as a kind of professor emeritus. Three years ago, Charleston learned its lessons the hard way. Hurricane Hugo struck the city with devastating force. Now Florida and Louisiana are digging out from the calamity of Hurricane Andrew, and the devastation is worse.

Insurance and reinsurance companies in the United States and elsewhere expect to pay record sums that could exceed $8 billion for damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew.dTC Property and casualty insurers will pay an estimated $7.3 billioin claims to hurricane victims in Florida alone, trade industry officials told a conference in Miami, yesterday, citing figures from the Property Claim Service unit of American Insurance Services Group, in New York.The estimate does not include insured losses from Hurricane Andrew in Louisiana or other areas affected.