Entire islands have been reduced to rubble, streets have turned to rivers, cranes have buckled, and more than 30 people have died. But the six-toed Hemingway cats are fine.
The 54 cats, many of them descendants of a white polydactyl cat owned by Ernest Hemingway, live at the writer’s house in Key West, Fla., which was hit hard by Hurricane Irma.
As the storm approached last week, officials ordered a full evacuation of the Florida Keys. But Jacque Sands, the general manager of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, refused to leave. She had an obligation, she said, to see the property and the cats through the hurricane.
Animal lovers fretted. One of Hemingway’s granddaughters, the actress Mariel Hemingway, publicly urged Sands to move to safety. “I think you’re wonderful and an admirable person for trying to stay there and to try to save the cats and the house,’’ she said in a video posted by TMZ, but “this is frightening. This hurricane is a big deal.’’
“Get in the car with the cats and take off,’’ Hemingway pleaded.
Sands did not. The cats, she said, would come inside when the barometric pressure dropped, and they and their human attendants would be safe within the 18-inch-thick limestone walls of the house.
It appears she was right: The house’s curator, Dave Gonzales, confirmed Monday that the cats, many of which have six or seven toes, were unharmed.
New York Times
Florida insurers check their balance sheets
When the storm is over and the streets are safe again, Floridians will be checking what has become of their homes. They may also want to check on their insurers.
The big national carriers like State Farm and Allstate cut back on writing homeowners’ insurance in Florida years ago, citing catastrophic risks and unhelpful state regulators. Those reductions left a vacuum that the state filled, initially, with a state-owned insurer, Citizens Property Insurance. Eventually, the state offered incentives to coax some brave new insurers into the market.
As a result, all that may seem to stand between Florida’s homeowners and potential ruin is one state-owned insurer and dozens of relatively little-known companies that do all or most of their business in the state. They all have the benefit of the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, which, with no major storms in the past 12 years, has $17 billion at the ready — a sum that may not be nearly enough.
“This can really be a hurricane that can bust the insurance industry,’’ said Shahid Hamid, a finance professor at Florida International University’s International Hurricane Research Center. “When I saw Irma’s track, I was tremendously concerned.’’
Whether policyholders can be made whole is likely to depend on reinsurance — the custom-tailored insurance that the Florida insurers themselves take out — and other financial vehicles that they have to fall back on. But the number of variables at play — the exact path of the storm, the companies’ balance sheets, and the details of their reinsurance contracts — could produce differing fortunes for the various companies.
Fortunately, some forecasters sharply rolled back their damage estimates, as Irma moved up the Florida Peninsula and lost strength.
“There may yet be a Florida insurance market on Tuesday,’’ said Charles C. Watson Jr. of Enki Holdings LLC, who had been projecting losses of $172 billion on Sunday morning but just $49 billion by evening.
AIR Worldwide, a catastrophe modeling firm in Boston, predicted Monday that Irma’s insured damage in the United States would cost the industry $20 billion to $40 billion. If insured property in the Caribbean was included, the total projected losses would range from $25 billion to $55 billion, according to Kevin Long, a spokesman.
New York Times
