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From the devastating and deadly wildfires in Southern California to the one-two punch of climate change-fueled hurricanes slamming into Florida and the Southeast, natural disasters that have impacted the U.S. in the last year have been the costliest the nation has seen in nearly a century, according to a new report from AccuWeather.
The Santa Ana wind-fanned firestorms erased neighborhoods and claimed 27 lives, both young and old. Hurricanes Helene and Milton brought more than 40 trillion gallons of rain to the region, resulting in the deaths of more than 100 people in North Carolina.
As the world continues to warm, climate change is making natural disasters stronger and more damaging, increasing in severity and frequency. The recent fires were fueled by hurricane-force winds, but also by tinderbox conditions driven by climate-fueled drought.
“The catastrophic wildfires burning in Southern California combined with destructive hurricane impacts last year have been the worst series of natural disasters in America since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s,” AccuWeather founder Dr. Joel N. Myers said in a recent release.
Myers said that drought, water, and insurance concerns would likely force Californians out of the state some 90 years after the Dust Bowl’s migration to California.
The preliminary estimated cost of the fires stands between $250 to $275 billion, noted the media forecasting company.
Myers forecast that with thousands of multi-million-dollar homes destroyed, impacts to property values and a loss of tax revenue will likely have major implications for the region’s economy that could “worsen the migration out of California, as more families consider moving to states with lower taxes and a lower risk of wildfires.”
The monetary estimate is higher than others because it includes the price of immediate and long-term health care, excess deaths, and dozens of additional factors like cleanup costs, damage to crops and infrastructure, travel delays, power outages, emergency management, relocations, and government expenses.
But, that’s only a fraction of the economic toll of nine additional disasters that AccuWeather had issued preliminary estimates for over the course of the past 12 months. The total estimated damage and economic loss has leapt to nearly $800 billion, it said.
“Damage estimates based only on insured losses and direct impacts grossly underestimate the long-term financial losses that families, businesses, and communities endure after a weather disaster,” Myers explained. “There are many compounding factors that can multiply the financial impacts in the months and years after a disaster.”
There were 27 confirmed weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion that resulted in the deaths of 568 people, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
