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Reuters) - Hurricane Sandy appears to have easily caused twice or even three times the losses of last year's Hurricane Irene, but final totals will be hard to come by for some time because of the scale of the disaster, catastrophe forecasting companies said on Tuesday.

One of the biggest questions now is who will pay for the extensive damage to municipal infrastructure -- subway tunnels, train tracks, electrical transformers, coastal boardwalks and piers -- that Sandy left behind along the East Coast.

The short answer, experts say, is that there may be some insurance in place for certain losses, but beyond that taxpayers could well end up on the hook for most of it.

AIR Worldwide, one of the three primary firms used by the insurance industry to calculate disaster exposures, indicated that Sandy is likely to have caused insured losses of anywhere from $7 billion to $15 billion. That figure excludes residential flood losses as well as subway and tunnel flooding.

Its assessment follows that of peer Eqecat, which said late Monday that Sandy was apt to cause anywhere from $5 billion to $10 billion in insured losses and from $10 billion to $20 billion in economic losses.

If AIR is correct, Sandy would rank as the third-worst hurricane in history, based on inflation-adjusted losses, according to the Insurance Information Institute.

A clearer picture should emerge in the days ahead as insurers get their catastrophe teams into the most affected areas and begin making assessments. Allstate said it had more than 1,100 claims staff ready to go once the storm has passed.

Eqecat and its peers are likely to refine their estimates as well. RMS, the other large disaster modeler, said Sandy should outdo the roughly $4.5 billion in insured losses Irene caused after hitting the northeast in August 2011, though it has not assigned a precise figure as yet.

"Sandy

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