I found the article quite interesting. While I have not read the policy, I am somewhat familiar with insurance claims. The insurer says the policy covers either the cost to repair, or the actual value ( without deducting for depreciation ), which ever is less. . It is as if your house ( excluding the land ) was worth $100,000 but the cost to rebuild it exactly as before was $150,000, then you would only be covered for $100,000. ( Many of us in the US have replacement cost coverage, which means we get the cost to replace, even if it is more than the value) Since the airport has not been repaired, the insurance company was saying it is too early to pay, because they don't know whether all items will be repaired, and they need to look at each item, determine exactly what it would cost to repair, and it s actual value, and determine which is lower. Apparently, experts for both sides have done the calculations, but they only agreed as to about $10 mil of the damages. The difference between the two experts as to the remaining items is about $36 mil. That may be in part because some of the cost to "repair" may be deemed to be an improvement, or that some repair was necessary before the storm and was not damaged by the storm.

The part I found most fascinating, and may be tied up for quite some time, was the loss profits claim. In an earlier thread, I saw the suggestion that loss profits would be easy, look at the revenue from the prior years. In this case, however, the insurance company argued that it did not insure the remainder of St. Maarten, it only insured the loss of profits that would result from damage only to the airport. While the airport revenues dramatically declined after the storm, the insurance company is saying that part of the decline is due to the damage to the rest of the island. I have not looked at the policy, but I think it is an interesting point - if the hurricane hit only the airport, and the rest of the island was spared, the total loss profit could easily be estimated by looking at profit in prior years. On the other hand, if the hurricane damaged the rest of the island, as IRMA did, and did not damage the airport at all, clearly the airport profits would be much less after the hurricane, due to the decrease in tourism. In reading the article, I did not see any mention of an appeals court. I also saw that the insurer says that the whole matter needs to be resolved by arbitration - if there is an appeal, that may cause a delay if it is sent to arbitration.