The Cost of Irene

Now that Hurricane Irene has made her way through, it's time to assess the damage and begin to repair our state. Thankfully, upon the most recent assessment, no one in New Jersey was killed, even though 18 other people in eight other states lost their lives. Since Irene made landfall here, that has to be considered a blessing.

There is obviously, though, a great deal of physical damage. On Sunday morning, Governor Christie estimated the cost of the damage "in the billions of dollars, if not in the tens of billions of dollars." Much of that is covered by insurance, of course; the disaster experts at Kinetic Analysts now predict that the storm's cost to insurers will be around $3 billion. That leaves, according to Kinetic, another $4 billion in losses that aren't insured.

So if we exceed that and reach the higher end of Christie's estimate, there will be an awful lot of uninsured damage that will somehow need to be paid for. On the other hand, it could have been much worse. Kinetic's damage estimate from last week, before the storm hit, forecast the damage at $14 billion.