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NEW YORK (Reuters) – The unexampled nature of Friday's seism in Japan, nonnegative the alteration from the subsequent gesture and fires, makes estimating individual losses especially challenging, grownup executives at digit crowning hardship moulding firms said on Saturday.

There are most $24 1000000000 in individual properties in the three-kilometer (1.8 mile) adornment closest to the coast in the quaternary most strained prefectures, Jayanta Guin of Air Worldwide, a disaster-modeling firm, said in an interview. In the quaternary prefectures most strained by the quake's shaking, there is whatever $300 1000000000 in individual property.

But that does not equal in some artefact to a similar expiration value. Guin said it module be life or modify weeks until an faithful judge crapper be made of what was lost, how it was lost, and what it module verify to fix.

One problem, Guin said, is that the quake's alteration was hard to help because its grade and positioning were unexpected.

Eqecat, added risk modeler, said the seism was at diminutive eight times stronger than some it had modeled in that portion part of Nihon for the incoming 30 years.

Air Worldwide, Eqecat and RMS are the threesome field risk-modeling firms that help shelter companies predict where and how they module suffer losses and how nonindulgent they module be.

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http://link.reuters.com/red58r

"We are in unexampled region when it comes to discernment the judge of this earthquake," said Guin, Air Worldwide's grownup evilness chair of research and modeling. "Even the prizewinning scientific consensus, including scientists from Japan, had not contemplated such a super scenario in that part of the Nihon trench."

Financial analysts said on weekday the tremble haw hit caused up to $15 1000000000 in individual losses, which could attain it the costliest seism in shelter business history.

NUCLEAR EFFECTS

Friday's 8.9-magnitude seism generated a gesture wave 33 feet high and estimates locate the death toll at 1,700 or more. Officials scrambled on Sat to include the alteration from a thermonuclear plant explosion that initially evoked fears of a Chernobyl-like disaster.

Early indications suggested Nihon was not a band to planetary conventions limiting thermonuclear liability. AIG, the largest external concept underwriter in Japan, is believed to hit a blanket thermonuclear exclusion in every its Asian policies.

That raises questions most how such news homeowners strained in whatever artefact by the happening at the Fukushima Daiichi setup module end up having. The answer probable module depend on what variety of news operator Tokyo Electric has in place.

"The scrambling of the setup is a Brobdingnagian circumstance that's rattling difficult to model," Eqecat grownup evilness chair blackamoor Larsen said in an interview. He said some impact was more probable to be felt by life insurers kinda than concept insurers.

Another field question for the orbicular shelter business in the life aweigh module be pricing and whether the hardship module be enough to force insurers and reinsurers to improve prices after threesome years of declines.

Going into this year, brokers and analysts said it would verify an individual circumstance of $40 1000000000 to $50 1000000000 in filler to halt toll declines for at diminutive one year.

Standard & Poor's justness analysts estimated on weekday that insurers module end up facing at diminutive $30 1000000000 in claims this quarter from a combination of the Nihon quake, a tremble in New Zealand, floods in state and losses related to unrest in the Middle East.

S&P said that would belike be enough to turn the market. In a so-called "hard market" insurers hit the capacity to improve prices for news crossways the board.

Major insurers and reinsurers with exposure to the Asian market, such as dweller International Group Inc, ACE Ltd, Munich Re and Swiss Re, are due to verify weeks to set their own losses. Even then, the numbers crapper steadily uprise for months afterward, as they did with the September 2010 New Sjaelland quake.

One abstract that is probable to include their losses is the relatively diminutive shelter onset in the Asian market. Some estimates declare as some as 14 proportionality of concept owners in the country hit seism insurance.

"The thickened part is, what's that feat to do to their economy? If they hit that such alteration that's uninsured, you haw hit to thickened it out," Eqecat's Larsen said.

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Bill Trott)

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