A new white paper from the I.I.I., Hurricane Katrina: The Five Year Anniversary, cited the following key insurance facts on Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana on August 29, 2005:
- Private sector insurers paid policyholders a total of $41.1 billion after receiving 1.7 million auto, home and business claims. This makes Hurricane Katrina the costliest disaster in the history of the global insurance industry.
- The federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) paid out $16.1 billion in flood insurance claims, a dollar amount higher than what the NFIP paid to all of its claimants combined between 1968 and 2004.
- Louisiana and Mississippi incurred about 97 percent of all Katrina-related losses, although Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee were also impacted.
- Fewer than 2 percent of Katrina homeowners insurance claims in Louisiana and Mississippi were disputed either through mediation or litigation.
- Katrina claims settlement levels were extremely high. By the second anniversary of the disaster, approximately 99 percent of the 1.2 million personal property claims had been settled.
- Private sector insurers paid out anywhere from $2 billion to $3 billion in Katrina-related offshore energy facility claims.