Claims tangle for Tianjin

Certainly this is going to be bigger in terms of its total financial impact than the Costa Concordia incident, he told Port Strategy, although nobody knows yet how far-reaching it will be: “We are only just starting to uncover the scale of the disaster, many of the records are missing because one of the buildings hit was the port’s record office and on the ground it’s hard to see what has been lost.”

He explained that getting to grips with the claims is going to be quite difficult: “There has been a 2km exclusion zone where people just can’t get in to see the extent of the damage – although we know that at the centre there’s been a 1 km area where everything is a total write-off,” he said.

So there will probably be precious little for the assessors to see, making reconstruction scenarios difficult.

The loss will include thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, of cars. However, piecing together the details could be difficult as many have already been summarily crushed in the necessary clean-up of the area – one of the main worries being contamination of the area by cyanide, spread by the secondary chemical explosions at the port warehouses.

Mr Newman explained that it is not just cars directly hit by explosion or fire damage that will be part of the final, considerable sum: “Even if there is only the slightest hint of cyanide exposure or salt water damage, the manufacturers won’t take any chances, they will be crushed.” However, it’s not just cars: “Tianjin has hit every kind of insurer… property, goods and even the tragic casualties; it has affected everyone – right across the board.”

However, although the insurers won’t be able to recover anything like the value of the payouts and stand to lose a large amount, Mr Newman doesn’t think that it will really do much to change the way the insurance business is conducted “as not even hurricane Sandy” changed attitudes in the long run.