Experts are predicting that the damages from Hurricane Ian in Florida could be anywhere from $27 billion to $47 billion, but the actual amount will be "significantly higher," John Quelch, the dean of the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami tells Newsmax.
"That estimate is only relevant to the real estate insured losses, the property damage associated with real estate," Quelch said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America" Sunday. "The actual number, or the final number, is going to be significantly higher than that because a very large proportion of people did not have flood insurance and those people are going to be facing losses that are simply not included in the $27 billion to $47 billion estimate."
According to CoreLogic, a U.S. property data and analytics company, insurers are preparing for a multi-billion-dollar hit and say Hurricane Ian could be the most expensive storm since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, reports Reuters.
The wind losses alone for commercial and residential properties is expected to come in at between $22 billion and $32 billion, CoreLogic said, and then insured storm surge losses are expected to add another $6 billion to $15 billion in losses.
In addition to destroying homes and businesses, the massive storm also caused large damages to infrastructures such as water, power, and transportation, and when Newsmax asked Quelch if union contracting could cause delays in awarding reconstruction contracts, he responded that there is "certainly a need at this juncture for political leadership" to get projects underway.
In the first few days after the storm, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his team went into "top gear" to accelerate the rescue operations and to get vital services like electricity and communications restored quickly, said Quelch.
"After that, it becomes essential to do the damage assessment and then to do the contracting for the public works for infrastructure that has to be rebuilt," he said. "Now to the extent that some of that infrastructure is going to be rebuilt with federal funds, as opposed to state-controlled funds, the governor's hands may not be totally free in terms of setting the ground rules for the bidding process."
Even then, rebuilding will not be easy or fast, because there will be heightened building codes after the storm, and flood zones may be extended because of the severity of the storm and the surge that went further inland than had been expected, said Quelch.
"I think most people might argue that we don't want to necessarily rebuild exactly what we had beforehand because we want to strengthen our infrastructure and homes to resist anything like this in the future," he added.
He also warned that obtaining home and flood insurance will be more expensive after the damages brought by Hurricane Ian.
"The insurance industry in Florida is quite fragile, with several companies having gone bankrupt in the last year or two," he said. "This is going to be a major challenge for the governor and the legislature in the months ahead to put in place an insurance infrastructure that's sufficient to backstop the kind of claims that will occur off these sorts of events."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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