Flood damage from Hurricane Delta surrounding structures destroyed by Hurricane Laura on October 10, 2020, in Creole, Louisiana. (Mario Tama / Getty Images) “We’ve got ourselves a little monster out there,” anchorman Jim Cantore warned , facing the camera in the Weather Channel’s newsroom on a sultry August weekend in 1992. At first, few in Florida were paying attention. “It’s very hard to get people to believe that there’s some danger from some element of nature that they haven’t experienced before,” a reporter told Cantore, as the channel played tape of tranquil beaches and neat vacation homes. As the storm approached Florida, it gained the moniker “Andrew,” rapidly intensifying into a Category 5 hurricane as it exceeded wind speeds of 165 mph . Karen Clark watched updates on TV from her home in Boston with fascinated horror — and her career on the line. Most insurance companies at that time assessed hurricane exposure in their portfolios by simply multiplying customer premiums by a rough factor of supposed risk, rather than tracking actual property replacement costs. “They were just very crude formulas,” she said. So in 1987, Clark had started her own company, Applied Insurance Research, or AIR, to develop software that better estimated the potential losses from catastrophic events. Unlike the rest of the industry, she used granular data and sophisticated analyses, an approach now called catastrophe modeling. Her first computer model estimated that a Category 5 hurricane hitting Dade County could cause losses almost ten times more than previously believed. She warned her customers about the risk in Florida, but until Hurricane Andrew, no one listened. “The good ol’ boys at Lloyds [of London], you know, they thought they had it all figured out,” she said. “They didn’t need any help from this American woman carrying around a […]