WINTER STORM DAGMAR HITS NORDICS

Windstorm Dagmar struck northern Scandinavia on Christmas Day and then restrengthened to cause further damage on December 27th. Massachusetts-based catastrophe modeller AIR Worldwide said that the storm developed "almost suddenly", speeding east from the Faroe Islands to Norway, hitting north of Bergen, then cutting east towards Sweden and Finland. Dagmar was described by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute as possibly the third-worst storm to hit the country in the past 50 years. Claims have only just begun to come in, but Finance Norway, which co-ordinates Norwegian natural disaster claims, said that it expected the total insurance liability to exceed the $46m received as a result of Winter storm Berit. Dagmar might cause even greater losses in Finland, where the path of the storm was across the southern, more populated part of the country. In Finland the storm was reported to have caused the worst power failures since storm Janika in November 2001. Risto Karhunen, head of loss prevention and security at the Federation of Finnish Financial Services, told Bloomberg that the storm could have caused "extensive damage", noting that four local storms in 2010 caused total claims in the region of €100m ($130m).