Event	Date	Insured Loss (AUD$million)
Sydney hailstorm, NSW	April, 1999	1700
Newcastle earthquake, NSW	December, 1989	1124
Cyclone Tracy, Darwin, NT	December, 1974	837
Sydney hailstorm, NSW	March, 1990	384
Canberra fires, ACT	January, 2003	350
Brisbane floods, QLD	January, 1974	328
VIC and SA bushfires	February, 1983	324
Brisbane hailstorm, QLD	January, 1985	299
Sydney windstorm, NSW	January, 1991	226

 The differences between the IDRO list and the Risk Frontiers’ Building Damage estimates can be attributed to, inter alia:

• The shorter IDRO record
  
  
• The IDRO lower cutoff of AUD$1 million and AUD$10 million (it varies), misses smaller loss events
  
  
• Flood losses (and landslide losses) are seldom insured in Australia
  
  
• Insured hailstorm losses include motor vehicles (and, to a lesser extent, crops)

A breakdown of the proportions contributed by the various insurance classes to the losses in Table 5 is available for only a few events, so that comparisons with the Risk Frontiers’ data are not simple. However, for example, residential building and contents, motor vehicles, and commercial buildings and contents each contributed between one-third and one-quarter of the insured losses in the 14 April, 1999 Sydney hailstorm.

Table 6 lists the 20 events that contributed the most to the House Equivalent damage in the Risk Frontiers’ database for the period 1900-2003. The li st includes six floods, five bushfires (really bushfire days), four tropical cyclones, three thunderstorms and two earthquakes. This mix reinforces the view that natural hazards risk in Australia is not dominated by just one or two hazards.

Seven of the 20 events in the list occurred before the insurance record began in 1967.

Although smaller events post-1998 have not been included in the sum, the 20 events listed in Table 6 contributed just over 50% of the total HE recorded in the 1,200 events in the Risk Frontiers’ database. As with the death database, a few events dominate the total record.

Table 6: Events ranked by HE (1900-2003)