Local insurers yesterday said they had received claims for damage from Hurricane Fabian of $70 million to $75 million.

BF&M president and chief executive officer Glenn Titterton said it was difficult to make accurate estimates at this early stage and the figure would probably have to be revised upward as time went on, but 2,600 claims had been logged with all of the Island's insurance companies.

"This is a very early and sketchy estimate," he said. "We are in the midst of so much, you cannot get an accurate figure yet as there are so many claims."

But he said a preliminary study by AIR Worldwide Corp of $350 million and published on Monday was "grossly exaggerated".

Mr. Titterton said he was familiar with the model used to get the figure, and it constantly threw up high figures for catastrophes. He said it used only Caribbean data where houses are built to lower specifications than in Bermuda.

Mr. Titterton added that his estimate, which is based on preliminary estimates and conversations with the other insurers in Bermuda pludds estimates of the damage to the Sonesta and Fairmont Southampton, did not include other costs such as repairs to the Causeway or the cost of embodying the Bermuda Regiment or the economic loss.

"We took 300 claims on the first day, and 300 on the second day, but now, on day six, it has started to tail off," he said. And he said that now the companies could start to look better at the cost of the hurricane as the immediate work of processing the initial claims had begun to slow down.

"It is tailing off a little bit, and that will give me time to get better figures," he said. "But there are still hundreds of claims being reported daily."

And he said that the estimates at the total cost of insured losses could be wildly inaccurate, and added that this included "a pure guess" at what the cost to the Fairmont Southampton would be or the insured loss to the Bermuda Government.

Mr. Titterton stressed that there were many more claims to come and that it would be some time before the local insurance industry could be more precise about the number of claims it had suffered or the total value of the losses.

When asked if he knew how many houses were affected or uninhabitable, he said that it was difficult to know at this stage.

"It is not like when Hurricane Andrew hit in Florida, and everyone evacuated to government shelters and waited for the government to tell them what to do," he said. "One amazing thing about Bermuda is how people just get on with things. People have not waited and have moved out on their own - some have booked into hotels and others are relying on places like the Salvation Army and others."

And he added that others were soldiering on in damaged houses with no electricity and running water and damaged houses - when in other countries they may have been evacuated or sought government help.

Mr. Titterton said that due to this fact it was difficult to get a feel for how many houses were in fact uninhabitable.

Mr. Titterton added that the AIR Worldwide estimate, which was based on a model and not on actual claims, was one of several models used by reinsurance companies to look at potential losses that could happen.