Bermuda reinsurers will face heavy claims from New Zealand for the second time in less than six months after the country was hit by a deadly earthquake.Total losses from the quake that devastated Christchurch yesterday may top the $6 billion of losses from a previous quake in the same place in September, according to UK-based insurance analyst Peel Hunt.Last night the death toll was put at 75 from the 6.3-magnitude tremor which rocked New Zealand’s second-biggest city, at lunchtime local time. Last autumn’s 7.1-magnitude quake happened in the early hours of the morning and caused no deaths.Buildings, roads and sidewalks in Christchurch were badly damaged or destroyed.“It seems likely that the market loss will be larger than the September quake,” Mark Williamson, a London-based analyst at Peel Hunt, wrote in a note to clients yesterday. Overall losses from last year’s disaster are estimated at between $5.5 billion and $6 billion, he said.Catastrophe modellers Eqecat estimated that insured losses would probably exceed $1 billion, but added that the calculation was made more difficult by the fact that some buildings damaged in the first quake, or under repair, suffered further damage yesterday.Bermuda reinsurers picked up a large portion of the bill for the previous earthquake.Most reinsurers were forced to revise up their initial estimates from the September quake as the government-backed Earthquake Commission, a disaster relief fund that buys reinsurance, raised its loss forecast.Many of the Island’s global reinsurers participate in the New Zealand earthquake reinsurance pool and most suffered losses in the tens of millions as a result.PartnerRe, which made one of the highest loss estimates of $140 million to $160 million for the previous tremor, was down 4.1 percent New York Stock Exchange trading yesterday, while Flagstone Re fell 4.6 percent. XL Group was down 3.4 percent, while in London Stock Exchange trading, Catlin Group fell 3.5 percent.However, stocks generally were trading lower as oil prices soared in response to the uprising in Libya, with the S&P 500 closing down 2.05 percent.Prime Minister John Key described the scene as “utter devastation” on Television New Zealand. It’s too early to put “hard and fast numbers” on losses for individual insurers, Peel Hunt’s Williamson said.“Although this earthquake is of a lesser magnitude than the event from September, this earthquake was very shallow and within city limits,” Eqecat said in yesterday’s statement.“Ground motions within the city limits of Christchurch from this event could very likely exceed the motions from the last event. Initial reports indicate the collapse of buildings that did not collapse in September.”