Insurance industry loss estimates due to Hurricane Sandy are now topping US$20 billion, Fitch Ratings said Tuesday in a new report.

Preliminary estimates of the insured damage caused by the storm that struck the eastern U.S. coast in late October last year put it in the $5 billion to $10 billion range, although there was a great deal of uncertainty in those initial estimates and larger losses were always a possibility. Now, Fitch is saying that the industry will likely see losses of $20 billion or more.

The rating agency is basing the new expected total on the approximately $16 billion-$17 billion in loss estimates reported by individual companies so far; coupled with the fact that some firms have not been able to release their loss estimates yet, which, it says, could potentially add another $5 billion or more in losses to the industry.

Fitch notes that the complexity of assessing insurance losses from such a large and intense storm over a widespread region has created this uncertainty in estimating the ultimate insured losses.

“Due to the size and nature of Sandy, a larger proportion of losses were incurred from commercial lines versus personal lines,” it says. “Primary writers with substantial Northeast catastrophe exposures are incurring the most significant losses, with reinsurers taking a more reduced, although still meaningful share. While many of the typical property lines of insurance are being impacted, it was a particularly outsized event for auto losses and marine insurance.”

However, it also says that the storm demonstrated the spread of loss and limited concentration risk among individual insurance companies “resulting in manageable losses to insurers”.

Fitch says its analysis finds that ” Hurricane Sandy is not likely to change market underwriting capacity and tip the balance to a hard property market. Initial reports on reinsurance pricing at the Jan. 1 renewals indicate that Sandy helped to stabilize rates, with U.S. property catastrophe pricing flat to up slightly overall, although loss impacted business experienced more significant rate increases.”