Tianjin Port Explosions (2015)
Explosions at a chemical warehouse in the port of Tianjin that destroyed thousands of new cars and containers, exposing the accumulation of goods in transit concentrated in a single port.
On August 12, 2015, a fire at a hazardous goods warehouse in the port of Tianjin, China, set off two successive explosions that killed 173 people. The damage hit buildings, port facilities, containers and the thousands of new cars parked in import lots all at once. The loss exposed a blind spot in underwriting: each cargo policy is written shipment by shipment, and no insurer sees the total quantity of goods it covers at the same moment on the same quay. Yet ports, free zones and car lots are concentration points where the commitments of dozens of shippers pile up. Since then, the market has modeled these port accumulations as a catastrophe exposure in their own right, and the official inquiry into illegal chemical storage also underlined how much public oversight weighs in this risk.
In its sigma study published in 2016, Swiss Re estimated the insured losses from the Tianjin explosions at $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion, making it the largest man-made insured loss ever recorded in Asia and the third largest in the world, after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Piper Alpha platform explosion.
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