Hurricane Francine with 100 mph winds Torn apart in southern Louisiana On September 11, hundreds of thousands of people lost power. But the most dangerous and destructive impact was the storm surge that pushed ocean waters ashore, flooding coastal parishes like Terrebonne and Lafourche. Preliminary estimate AccuWeather estimates damage could reach $9 billion, though that number is likely to be revised as scientists, insurance companies and government officials gather more data.
In the days, weeks, and months after a hurricane like Francine makes landfall, many public agencies and insurance companies work to get a rough idea of how much damage the disaster will do. This is more than just a written number. These estimates help state governments prioritize where to send aid and begin filing claims, so people and local economies can recover from the disaster more quickly.
Hurricane damage estimates often vary dramatically because each is created for a unique purpose. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s preliminary assessment: It is used to help you make decisions during the first 30 days after landing. It will help you determine whether a major disaster declaration is needed and help officials determine what public assistance programs are needed in the disaster area.
Early damage estimates can increase public awareness and increase the amount of aid donated. “That’s what happened with Harvey in Texas in 2017,” said John Porter, AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist. “Many people across the country didn’t realize the scale and severity of the damage and suffering caused by the storm. When AccuWeather released our preliminary estimate of total damage and economic losses from Harvey—$190 billion—we saw additional aid and relief pour in from across the country to Texas.”
Insurance companies can make quick estimates of damage because they already have data on property values. “But to really get an accurate picture, you need to do careful case studies,” said Adam Rose, who studies disaster economics at the University of Southern California. “These studies are usually done a year or two later, but it’s useful to have a quick, rough estimate right up front.”
AccuWeather’s preliminary estimates capture a range of costs, including property and infrastructure damage, lost jobs and wages, and airport closures. “Our estimates also include evacuation costs, temporary relocation costs, and long-term impacts on transportation, tourism, and business logistics,” Porter said.
Calculating the cost of disasters is also important in the long term, as it informs people of the economic significance of disasters and serves as an indicator of whether progress is being made in recovering from such events. One of the most frequently cited sources on a national scale is $1 Billion Weather and Climate Disasters The dataset is a monthly report published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information. The dataset records disasters in the United States that exceed a $1 billion threshold, compiled by combining public federal and state statistics with private sector data such as insurance claims. According to Adam Smith, an applied climatologist at the agency and lead on the dataset,
That multi-billion dollar price tag includes losses from a variety of extreme weather events, including hurricanes, storms, tornadoes, floods, winter storms, wildfires, droughts, and heat waves. But not all financial damages are included in the calculation. Only what NOAA considers “total direct losses” are included.
Their definition of direct total loss spans 16 different categories, including damage to homes, vehicles, businesses, and government buildings and their contents, business interruption, and loss of living space while home is vacated during repairs or reconstruction. The assessment also includes damage to roads, bridges, charging systems, power grids, and crops. As Smith explains, it’s “a comprehensive, yet still conservative estimate of what was truly lost.”
As the Gulf Coast sinks, hurricanes like Francine become more dangerous.
According to Smith, there are still many areas that are not covered, such as health-related costs caused by disasters or the environmental damage that can occur when a hurricane hits.
The $1 billion dataset estimate not only excludes physical health care costs, but also fails to account for mental health crises caused by natural disasters. And then there’s nature. Suppose a coral reef or a mangrove forest, two well-established natural buffers against storm surge, are damaged by a hurricane, effectively reducing the area’s resilience to future storms. The associated costs are also not factored into the $1 billion disaster damage assessment.
By not considering all of these outcomes, in addition to other costs that occur after a disaster, such as supply chain disruptions, this dataset captures only a portion of the total cost of major disasters, and provides only a snapshot of what losses might look like as global warming makes disasters more frequent and severe.
When things like mental and physical health damage are not taken into account, disasters can result in those who suffer the most from being left out, and we need to think about what can be done to ease this historical burden.
“If we focus only on the cost to the economy, aren’t disaster losses bearable? Within our economy, GDP tends to rise after disasters in the United States,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “That doesn’t mean it’s good.”
After a storm, businesses may find it difficult or impossible to restart due to the loss of power and water, and the destruction of bridges and roads. This is a form of widespread economic damage. When a hurricane hits New Orleans and Louisiana, and economic productivity declines in the years following, it takes a lot of number crunching to figure out how much the storm itself contributed, and how much productivity would have been lost anyway.
The nature of hurricanes means that economic damage can spread far beyond the coastline they hit. Atlantic hurricanes form in the ocean, fueled by warm water, and then can slam into ports along the Gulf and East Coasts, as Katrina did. $1.7 billion in damage To Louisiana ports. Even ports that aren’t hit can have economic ripple effects. Ended as a precaution As the storm approaches, goods don’t get to where they’re needed on time, and costs pile up.
So in the long run, the economic losses from hurricanes will often be much higher than initially estimated. But these early rough estimates are important to avoiding greater losses later on. “Getting insurance companies to pay their premiums sooner and government support more quickly and effectively can help us start recovering and reduce losses from business interruption,” Rose said.
When we talk about disaster damage, it’s often in the language of business and economics, with huge dollar signs. But there’s a danger in focusing too much on the price tag, Rumbach warns, and that danger has to do with how disasters expose and exacerbate existing social divisions. “There’s also a bigger question we should always be asking: Is monetary value the right metric?”
In Rumbach’s view, a hurricane could destroy a mansion and a dozen less expensive mobile homes. The damage to the mansion and the collective damage to the mobile homes, as governments and insurance agencies pressure them, may be similar, but the scale of the impact is not the same.
“If you focus too much on economic numbers, you risk underestimating the impact of disasters on the disadvantaged,” Rumbach said. “All the costs associated with it go down. They have less income. Their home values go down. Infrastructure costs go down. Does that make disasters less important because they cost less?”
