You may not remember the tornado that swept through western Mississippi on the night of Friday, March 24, but Eldridge Walker does.
Walker, who is both the mayor and the undertaker for the town of Rolling Fork, said it is still hard to comprehend the devastation it has caused in his town. The twister killed 17 people and injured another 165. It destroyed dozens of homes, as well as the city hall, the fire and police stations, post office, elementary school, high school, and hospital — not to mention Walker’s home and business. The damage exceeded $100 million, and the cost of the storm that the cyclone unleashed approached $2 billion.
Nine months later, the repair remains a work in progress.
“It’s still going on, and it will continue as long as I’m mayor,” he told Grist this week. The tornado has a wave of national attention and a spot on it Good morning America, but help was slower to arrive. Only a handful of the more than 700 people who lost their homes have managed to rebuild, and dozens are still living in hotels waiting for the federal government to provide them with temporary housing.
“They have a lot going on to facilitate what they do for cities and municipalities after storms,” Walker said of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which had to respond to a series of disasters in the months after Rolling Fork ‘s destruction. “I’m just happy with the fact that I communicated with them.”
While Walker waits, the destruction of Rolling Fork has disappeared beneath headlines about wildfires, floods and heat waves elsewhere. Millions of people have begun to feel its pain: A November poll found that three-quarters of Americans have some kind of extreme weather in 2023.
By some measures, this year has been one of the worst for climate disasters. The US has seen more weather events causing at least a billion dollars in damage than at any other time on record. The origin of An El Niño weather pattern pushed global temperatures higher than ever before in recorded history and caused a wave of deadly heat waves as well as catastrophic floods.
By other measures, it was no more than an average year for a world that warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius. No major hurricanes made landfall in major cities, and the western continental United States remained free of megafires thanks to a wet winter. The year’s extreme weather has caused a cumulative death toll of about 373 people so far, far lower than last year’s tally of 474. Recent years, such as 2017, which had several major hurricanes, including Harvey and Maria, have been many times deadlier and more expensive.
While media coverage of disasters tends to focus on superlatives like “biggest,” “deadliest” and “most,” it’s not always helpful to compare one year to another, said Samantha Montano, a professor in emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy said. and an expert on disaster response policy.
“I don’t know that there’s a ton of value in comparing one year to the next,” she said. “The way disasters unfold, and the way climate change unfolds, is in averages — we’re looking at how things evolve over time. If you start taking year-to-year snapshots, you know, it’s less useful.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has maintained a count of billion-dollar disasters since 1980, providing some of the most comprehensive data on the economic impact of extreme weather. This year has seen 25 such disasters, the most on record, and NOAA’s map shows they have left almost no corner of the country untouched. Maui has seen the deadliest wildfire in modern American history in August, the South baked under a months-long drought, and Vermont experienced weeks of summer flooding. Together, these disasters caused more than $80 billion in damage.
The number of trillion-dollar disasters is rising, even when NOAA adjusts for inflation: There have been an average of eight and a half such events annually since the agency began keeping records in 1980, but in the past three years, ‘ an average seen. of 18 cross the billion-dollar threshold each year.
There are a few key reasons for this, says Adam Smith, the researcher at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information who leads the agency’s work on such disasters. The first and most obvious is this climate change make such catastrophes worse.
“A large majority of our country was built and designed during the 20th century, but now exists in a 21st century climate,” he said.
At the same time, Smith said, more people have moved into areas vulnerable to fires and floodswhich increases the overall risk profile of the country and ensures higher damages.
“You also have increasing vulnerability,” he said. “Where we build, how we build, and more importantly, how we rebuild are becoming increasingly important.”
Perhaps the most notable development this year is the increasing number of “severe convective storm” events in the South and Midwest. This thunderstorms often spray hail and spin tornadoes as they trudge across open ground. There have been at least a dozen such storms that have caused a billion dollars or more in damage this year, many of them in the spring and early summer, accounting for about half of the 10-figure disasters in the past 12 months. was recorded.
In a report that investigated disasters in the first half of 2023, the insurance group Aon listed the emergence of these storms as one of the most surprising developments.
“In contrast to large, catastrophic events, which sometimes cause extreme losses from primary hazards,” these storms “are characterized by higher (and increasing) frequency of smaller and medium-sized events.” Research suggests that convective storms tend to form more frequently and cause more damage as the climate warms, as warmer air can hold more moisture.
In most years, the costliest disaster is a hurricane or wildfire, but this year it was a drought in the central and southern United States: The drought stretched from Illinois to Louisiana and caused more than $10 billion in damage because it killed staple crops. and forced farmers to sell livestock that had become too expensive to feed. It also lowered water levels on the Mississippi River, making river freight more expensive. The fact that a drought took first place highlighted how much worse the year could have been, Smith said.
Even so, numbers don’t tell the whole story. Many of the most dramatic and damaging disasters of the year are not on NOAA’s list at all because the damage they caused is difficult to quantify. The most obvious example is the string of heat waves that baked cities from Chicago to Phoenix, enduring a month of consecutive 110-degree days. Scorching temperatures sent hundreds of people to the hospital and killed dozens, but did not cause as much damage to property and crops as a storm.
The wildfire smoke that the eastern cities were covered with a blanket when it drifted in from Canada is another example. Even brief exposure to all those particles can cause serious health effects for the elderly and people with lung disease, but such impacts are nearly impossible to quantify.
Beyond the immediate financial impact for people who lose their homes, the consequences can be harder to see. A large wildfire or storm can cause financial turmoil for insurance companieswhich may raise prices or flee dangerous markets, as happened in Florida and California. A widespread crop failure could cause local and international food prices to rise. And the destruction of school buildings can cause learning loss for students, such as happened in the rural communities outside of Oklahoma City after a tornado outbreak in April.
“This is a solid, conservative estimate, using the best public and private sector data, but we are not able to measure everything,” Smith said. “So the losses are actually higher than we can quantify.”
Still, the news of 2023 is not bad. The annual toll of climate disasters continues to rise, but the US is spending more money than ever on climate adaptation. FEMA distributed more than $2 billion this year to help protect communities from coastal flooding and shelters from wildfires, and these payments will continue in the coming years under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill. FEMA had to put these projects on hold over the summer as its all-important disaster fund ran low due to congressional inaction, but they resumed.
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An unexpected disaster can often come with a silver lining of sorts, as it prompts local officials to rethink how they build and prepare for future losses. A major flood can expose hidden risks in a neighborhood or a certain type of infrastructure. For example, New York State invested in larger seawalls after 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, and Colorado’s legislature recently sought to curb sprawling development after the 2021 Marshall Fire.
That was the case in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which experienced historic flooding in April when a sudden storm dumped more than 25 inches of rain on the city in a single day, submerging the airport and flooding several neighborhoods.
“I think everyone is on edge,” said Jennifer Jurado, the chief resilience officer for Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale. “Whether it was the county or the city, I don’t think anyone realized what was going to happen.”
The city’s main thoroughfare was submerged, as were many commercial boulevards, and the ramps leading to the main interstate highway were also flooded, meaning no one could move. The county was already trying to raise money to upgrade its stormwater system in residential communities, but now officials knew they also needed to invest in more pumps and drains for key highway entrances and commercial districts.
“If we had an evacuation order, no one could have left,” Jurado said. “It’s a staggering circumstance to think that under the right circumstances you can’t evacuate.”
The April storm gave Fort Lauderdale a glimpse of what’s to come. In an ominous coincidence, the province’s resilience committee held a previously scheduled meeting hours before the flood. Jurado happened to unveil new computer models that showed what municipal flooding could look like in a world with three feet of sea level rise, a major hurricane storm surge and a major flood. They predicted a flood that was very similar to the one that would occur right outside the district offices. Later, when Jurado tried to drive to the airport, she almost lost her car in the water.
Montano says the federal government needs a similar wake-up call. Congress has long sought to reform FEMA and the nation’s disaster relief policies, but it’s only a matter of time before there’s a disaster bad enough that lawmakers feel pressure to act. That disaster did not come this year, but it is surely coming.
