How many billion-dollar disasters will it take?
By The Herald Editorial Board
The weather disasters striking around us — torrential rain and flooding that have recently killed at least 37 in Appalachia, extended droughts over the last two decades in the Southwest U.S. that have reduced reservoirs such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead to near “dead pool” status, increases in wildfire frequency and acreage and property destroyed in the West and extended heat waves in the Northwest — have long moved past unrelated anecdotes to alarming trend.
It’s a devastatingly costly trend; in dollars and in lives, and one inescapably attributable to global warming and climate change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked the costs of weather-related disasters since 1980, totaling data on damage to infrastructure and private property to estimate the economic impact, counting up what it calls “billion-dollar disasters,” including hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, droughts, floods and wildfires.
For the years from 1980 to today, it has tallied 332 such disasters resulting in individual costs totaling $2.278 trillion, with an average annual cost of $53 billion a year. Over the same period, those disasters have resulted in 15,355 deaths, for an annual average toll of 357 deaths.
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