Skip to footer

'Billion-dollar weather': The 10 most expensive US natural disasters

Here are the top 10 priciest US natural disasters in 2017 dollars adjusted for inflation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

2. Hurricane Harvey (August, 2017): $125 billion

David J. Philip/AP/File
Rescue boats float on flooded streets as people evacuate after hurricane Harvey on Aug. 28, 2017 in Houston.

Hurricane Harvey’s torrential downpours brought more than 45 inches of rainfall to some parts of Houston. The massive floods that followed displaced more than 30,000 residents and cost $125 billion.

Nearly 80 percent of the homes damaged by the hurricane lacked flood insurance. The National Flood Insurance Program, in debt since 2005, reached its $30 million borrowing capacity a month after the storm and had to be bailed out to continue paying claims. Harvey reignited an ongoing effort among lawmakers to revise the insurance program and direct more funding toward flooding mitigation efforts.

Houston’s position as the capital of oil country also stoked environmental worries. After Harvey’s landfall, a roof on a Valero Energy Partners oil tank partially collapsed, releasing a cloud of toxic pollutants into the atmosphere and highlighting the oil industry’s vulnerability to extreme weather. The environmental group, Environment Texas, estimated that refineries produced more than 2 million pounds of emissions from shutdown and startup operations related to the storm.

9 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.