Heavy-tailedness and right-skewness are two typical features of loss data resulting from catastrophic events such as storms or earthquakes. In this paper we study the tail properties of the generalized crack distribution which has recently been introduced as an extension of the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution and the three-parameter Gaussian crack distribution. The theoretical tail relationships between the auxiliary (or baseline) distribution and the resulting generalized crack distribution are studied relying on the classical theories of extreme values and regular variation. A few concrete examples of heavy-tailed crack distribution are constructed and used for model fitting exercises on both simulated and real catastrophic loss data sets. The fitting results show that the heavy-tailed crack distribution with an appropriate choice of baseline density function outperforms some other commonly used parametric models.