Few places embody wealth and glamour quite like the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. The exclusivity of such neighborhoods in the city is one of the reasons why the wildfires which have struck the wider Los Angeles areacould become one of the costliest natural disasters in US history.
The wildfires have left at least 24 people dead, and have already destroyed tens of billions of dollars' worth of property. They've threatened iconic landmarks and have reduced several well-known LA locations and buildings to ash.
Estimates of the damages by insurers have risen as the disaster has worsened. New estimates from Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs put the potential losses for the insurance industry at $30 billion (€29.2 billion).
JPMorgan and others last week put a figure of around $20 billion on the losses.
It now appears that the wildfires will prove the most expensive wildfire disaster in US history in terms of insured losses (see graphic below), eclipsing the costs of other recent disasters in California and Hawaii.
There is also the distinction between insured losses — the assessed monetary amount of actual damages and losses covered by insurance — and wider economic damage which includes uninsured losses. Wider economic loss can also include lost wages, lost income for businesses and supply chain disruption.
The private US weather service AccuWeather, which also measures the costs of weather events, now estimates total losses at between $250 billion and $275 billion, almost double what it estimated last week. If those figures are borne out, it would make the LA wildfires the costliest natural disaster in US history.
Officials have said 12,000 buildings have already been destroyed, including many businesses. There is also significant damage to infrastructure, adding to the longer-term costs of reconstruction.