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USAFacts_Official OP t1_ivprm2e wrote

Source: National Centers for Environmental Information

Tools: Datawrapper, Illustrator

Is the number of major natural disasters increasing? More data here.

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CausticNox t1_ivps8wp wrote

Does this count inflation and population increases in high-risk areas? I would think more people = more property to be damaged.

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USAFacts_Official OP t1_ivptrhk wrote

Replying to CausticNox (#485,903)

This doesn't 100% answer your question, but since damage to homes, businesses, and government buildings goes into these estimates, then it's likely a safe assumption that places with more population will have more of these structures and higher costs. This is from the article:

>The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is responsible for calculating the costs of individual natural disasters. There are three main categories of direct or indirect costs that go into these estimates. These include physical damage to homes, businesses and government buildings, damage to property inside these buildings, and the costs associated with businesses being shut down or people losing their homes.
>
>The cost estimates don’t include environmental damages, any physical or mental healthcare costs, or larger supply chain impacts. The government also doesn’t attempt to put a price tag on the lives lost during a disaster.
>
>Because of the way disaster costs are calculated, the estimated totals are considered conservative evaluations. The true costs associated with natural disasters are difficult to capture due to the lack of immediate data and the hard-to-measure long-term costs.

And to answer the inflation question, the data here is adjusted for 2021 dollars.

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Ginger_Ninja247 t1_ivpzeh0 wrote

Or are costs being inflated by insurance companies?

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necro_owner t1_ivqctqc wrote

Is it adjusted for the fact that infrastructure are more expansive? I wouldn't want to be the one to point out, Bridge... and Power Line and you know any service infrastrusture... that cost billion to build and didn't exist in the 1900s

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MallardDrake-_- t1_ivqj49v wrote

I wonder how a frequency of inflation chart would look like placed over this

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dancingsteveburns t1_ivqo2ll wrote

I think more people need to ask if this was adjusted for inflation

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curious-but-spurious t1_ivqpi8v wrote

Argh. Sorry to gripe but this should be columns instead of bars. Time should proceed from left to right to reveal a more striking pattern.

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Wargoatgaming t1_ivqravw wrote

Maybe include Earthquakes.

This will act as a control to help answer two competing theories:

  1. Disasters are getting more expensive

Or

  1. There are (more/worse) weather related disasters
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GandalfTheBored t1_ivqtmjp wrote

It could mean there are more disasters, but it could also mean that there is just more spending on disasters in general. As some of the other comments have stated, our infrastructure has changed in 40 years and the gov could be protecting that investment by spending more when a disaster strikes.

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J_aner t1_ivqugxu wrote

Q: Did nothing major occur in 1987?

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maggiesyg t1_ivr1c0j wrote

Replying to necro_owner (#487,057)

I promise you, there were bridges and electric power lines and telephone lines in 1980 when this chart begins. Cable TV wires and cell phone towers are the only additions.

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chickenmantesta t1_ivr2u9f wrote

When I see a viz like this I wonder if investing in insurance companies is smart or foolish.

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Korvun t1_ivr3f93 wrote

The answer is no. 90% of the infrastructure that exists today didn't exist in the 1980s. The frequency of storms is not increasing, but the amount of expensive shit in their path has increased exponentially.

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Smooth_Imagination t1_ivr3tmn wrote

lives lost is though essentially at or near an all time low (strange but it has been declining over decades). The damage tracks with how much stuff there is to get damaged and claimed against. I assume that is what is being reported here, insurance claims? Is it inflation adjusted? Still 2022 looks like it was a worse year than usual and its half way through on that.

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SpiderFarter t1_ivr3x13 wrote

Also there is much more development in coastal areas making tropical storms and hurricanes more destructive.

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OkSpot2437 t1_ivr4fkr wrote

Replying to USAFacts_Official (#485,857)

Doesnt account for the fact of the amount of houses and buildings that have been built in the last 40 years. Areas where tornadoes and severe storms hit would've been empty barren land, now are developments.

You need to adjust for that a data. You need to adjust for the porpotion of land that is occupied by buildings/structures and unoccupied land.

​

If you can account for that, your data is flawed and mispresentative of the truth.

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structee t1_ivr4khk wrote

It's already out of date. Ian did $60+ billion dollars

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Poke-Party t1_ivr4wlb wrote

Replying to USAFacts_Official (#485,980)

As someone that is responsible for entering the some of the weather related data that goes into these figures I can tell you these numbers are very much conservative estimates. Many times we do not know the details of structures that are damaged and many times do not even hear of all the damage that occurs. Most of the time I am just trying to aim for the right order of magnitude but almost always stay toward the lower end of what seems reasonable as an estimate.

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hawklost t1_ivr7qd7 wrote

Replying to maggiesyg (#488,382)

Yes, but would the same bridge being built in 1980 cost the same in 2022?

Unless this adjusts for items like More power lines, bridges, houses, towers and other items like that in an area. And then also adjusts the costs of the items for inflation, this chart is t actually useful to show anything other than humans build more the longer we are around and things get more expensive over the years.

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floopy_loofa t1_ivrbfpz wrote

Replying to funderpantz (#488,525)

Yeah, we know. But a simple phone line can be spliced almost anywhere, repaired for cheap, and quick. Comparatively, a fiber line can't even be remotely fixed that fast or cheaply. Many times the line needs completely replaced which is insanely expensive and labor intensive. Infrastructure is just genuinely more expensive now than it was even in the 90's.

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calguy1955 t1_ivrbx6s wrote

It interesting how we think we are so much more advanced than previous generations. Engineers and contractors designed and built the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge from scratch in three years in the 1930s. No computers, just slide rules. When they needed to replace 1/2 of it in the 2000s it took 9 years and went 2500% over budget.

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mehnimalism t1_ivrqww5 wrote

More and more data tables with misleading or favorably truncated data.

Ignore inflation, ignore changes to infrastructure technology, choose $1B as a binary cutoff instead of total dollar amounts.

Lies, damn lies, single dependent variable data tables.

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Miserly_Bastard t1_ivs3flt wrote

Replying to maggiesyg (#489,858)

Standard metrics of inflation abysmally fail to capture the increase in the cost of repair and replacement of buildings and infrastructure over the span of decades. Moreover, rent is included in CPI but asset values relative to rents have ballooned into the stratosphere and are not included in CPI. When a tornado blows away a house, it destroys an asset.

It actually gets worse. The CPI is full of convolutions (just Google "hedonic adjustments") rendering it meaningless beyond the span of a few years.

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Korvun t1_ivsbniz wrote

Replying to funderpantz (#488,552)

High speed internet lines, much of the expanded power grid, additional roads, buildings, homes, etc. And that doesn't even consider the increased property value of the area. A home worth 80k in 1980 is selling for 480k today. Or do you think 1980 Miami is exactly the same as 2022 Miami?

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AuburnElvis t1_ivup1bu wrote

Replying to octagonlover_23 (#494,405)

Yeah. Say I'm a developer and I built a building last year worth $10M and I build another one this year. If I get a disaster that wipes them both out, that's $20M lost. If the same disaster had occurred a year ago, my losses would have been $10M, not $20M simply because I hadn't built the second building yet.

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