Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, reports were that catastrophe bonds for hurricanes probably would not be triggered.

Standard & Poor’s has ratings outstanding on $4.25 billion of natural peril catastrophe bonds. Of this, $1.61 billion carries an exposure to North Atlantic hurricanes, generally covering the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard states from Texas to Maine.
— Catastrophe bonds not likely to attach, S&P’s reports 8/30/2005

There appear to be no updates to this story since the flooding in New Orleans. This is presumably because hurricane cat bonds are triggered on things otehr than flooding:

Of these, $630 million is parametric, dependent only on measurements of wind speed or storm intensity, as provided by the National Hurricane Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. However, the majority of the notes–$975 million-�are indemnified, which means they are based on actual insured losses.

But those would be actual losses for wind and storm damage, not for flooding. And most such cat bonds are weighted towards losses in Florida, not the northern Gulf Coast.

There need to be a lot more cat bonds to cover disasters of the scale of Hurricane Katrina or of the 2004 typhoon.

-jsq