Weather Disasters Are Causing More Damage and Happening More Often | SERVPRO of Marietta West

7/8/2021 (Permalink)

When storms do damage to your home or business, we go to work to make things right. Contact SERVPRO of Marietta West to start the restoration process.

It was as though 2020’s penchant for punishment couldn’t be quelled: Not only did the year bring a devastating worldwide pandemic and an extended national quarantine, it also reached new heights when it came to extreme weather. In fact, 2020 saw more weather disasters than any previous year for which we have data.

When a weather event reaches a damage total of one billion dollars, it is officially classified as a disaster. 2020 saw a record-high of 22 of these events.

That total doesn’t even touch the host of other storms that caused issues but didn’t reach official disaster status—there were so many storms in the Atlantic, for example, that the National Weather Service depleted its list of names and had to break out the Greek alphabet for only the second time just to be able to give them all names.

One of those Greek storms was October’s Hurricane Zeta, which left a wide swath of damage and power outages in north Georgia.

Not Just Hurricanes

When you imagine financially devastating storms, you may think hurricanes first, and often that holds true. But the most expensive disasters of 2020 in the contiguous United States were thunderstorms and tornadoes: Almost two-thirds of the officially classified disasters were associated with storms.

These storms can cause issues that reach well beyond their region of occurrence. In August, a rare derecho formed from a storm system in Nebraska, ravaging over 10 million acres of corn fields, endangering half the state’s crop—that’s over 11% of the entire country’s corn.

Not Just 2020

We can hope 2020 was just an extreme example, but it seems as though it was only a high achiever over a recent average. There were $136 billion in damages caused by weather events in 2018 and 2019, and 2017 set a cost record with $300 billion in repairs. In fact, every year dating back to 2011 has seen at least eight billion-dollar disasters.

*If your storm precautions should become insufficient in an extreme weather situation, remember that SERVPRO is always standing by with 24⁄7 emergency support. Call us at (770) 428-5467 or click here for a customer contact request form. When storms do damage, we go to work to make things right.