Hurricane Milton (2024)

On the evening of October 9, 2024, Milton makes landfall near Siesta Key, south of Sarasota, as a Category 3 storm, after reaching Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico. Helene had come ashore in the Big Bend at the end of September; Florida's west coast took two storms in two weeks. The feared scenario, a storm surge into Tampa Bay, did not happen: the eye passed further south. That left wind, tornadoes on the east coast even before landfall, rain and flooding. Insured loss estimates varied widely; the modelers' first figures ran well above 30 billion, the consolidated numbers sit in the order of 20 to 25 billion dollars. For reinsurers, the year was good all the same. On January 1, 2023, after Ian, catastrophe program retentions had risen, often by a full layer, and the lower layers had disappeared or been repriced. At the Florida renewals of June 1, local cedants had followed. A loss that in 2022 would have reached three layers now reached one, or none. The first layer of loss sat elsewhere: with the Florida insurers themselves, with Citizens Property Insurance, the state's insurer of last resort, and with the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. The fund's mandatory layer reimburses a fixed share of losses above its own retention, and it funds itself with bonds when needed. Not to be confused with Ian (2022), which hit reinsurers and the cat bond market head on, under retentions that were still low.