The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that almost a dozen natural disasters in the United States have cost the country more than $25 billion in damages so far this year.
Analysis by the NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information shows that the United States has experienced 11 confirmed weather and climate disasters — each costing the U.S. more than $1 billion, including two winter storm events and nine severe storm events that killed 84 people in total.
Last year, the U.S. experienced 28 individual billion-dollar disasters that killed 492 people and cost the country $94.8 billion.
"2024 is in second place tied with 2017 and 2020 for the highest count of billion-dollar events [inflation-adjusted] during the first five months of a year," Adam Smith, applied climatologist and NOAA's lead scientist for Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters analysis, told DailyMail.com in an interview.
He added that the data collected by the NOAA report reaches only to mid-May, meaning that storms that occurred later in the month could push this year firmly into second place, ahead of 2017 and 2020.
Smith noted that this past year "is in the top eight of 45 years in terms of cost, but this ranking will increase next month once we complete our full May event analysis," since NOAA is "still assessing several costly hail events that occurred during the second half of May."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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