2007-01 · Windstorms

Kyrill — Europe

18 January 2007 · The storm that shut a continent. On 18 January 2007 Kyrill drove hurricane-force gusts across seven countries, scoring the highest severity index of the major loss storms and costing $6.7bn indexed insured.

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Kyrill sits second on severity across all 52 catalogued storms, behind Jeanette (2002, SSI 75.4), and third on insured loss, behind Daria (1990, $8.2bn) and Lothar (1999, $8.0bn). The gap between the two rankings is the whole underwriting problem. Jeanette carries the higher raw severity but no comparable published loss, because a storm's bill depends on where it tracks, not only how hard it blows. Kyrill is the storm that scores high on both: strong, wide and aimed straight at dense, well-insured Europe.

Key facts

Date: 18 Jan 2007
Storm severity index: 59.4
Peak gust: 36.4 m/s
Min pressure: 961.1 hPa
Insured loss: $6.7bn (2012)
Countries hit: 7 (XWS tally)
Deaths: ~47 (public record)

The story

On 18 January 2007 an intense Atlantic low named Kyrill swept across northern and central Europe, driving hurricane-force gusts from Ireland and the United Kingdom through the Netherlands and Germany. It killed around 47 people, forced Germany's Deutsche Bahn to halt the entire national rail network for the first time in its history, and left more than a million homes without power. Its $6.7bn indexed insured loss makes it the third-costliest storm in the catalogue.

Kyrill's lesson is correlation. A single system crossed seven national borders in about 36 hours, turning what would elsewhere be separate national events into one continent-wide loss. Its severity index of 59.4 is the highest of any storm in the record that also carries a major loss, because it held its strength over an unusually long track. For a board or reinsurer the takeaway is not the peak gust but the aggregation: European windstorm is priced as a pan-continental peril, and a Kyrill-shaped event lands in many portfolios at once.

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