(Bloomberg) -- Hurricane Helene, which has killed more than 100 people across the US Southeast, has also exacted a still-rising financial toll that puts the storm on course to be one of the country’s costliest.
As of Monday morning, AccuWeather Inc. estimates the total damage and economic loss from Helene may be as high as $160 billion. That’s up sharply from the $95 billion to $110 billion range it forecast late last week, before the magnitude of devastation became apparent. If losses match those preliminary estimates, Helene will go down as one of the nation’s top five most costly storms ever, the forecaster said.
“This is going to be one of the worst natural disasters in US history in terms of total damage and economic loss and the tremendous and urgent humanitarian crisis that is going on right now,” said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather.
AccuWeather’s forecast is higher than that of many competitors, since its calculations include a wider variety of items like lost wages, canceled flights and supply-chain disruptions, in addition to more traditional metrics such as damaged buildings, bridges and roads, Porter said.
Regardless of how companies measure the damage, forecasters across the board are revising their projections higher as scenes of widespread devastation emerge from the Appalachian region. Enki Research, for instance, which initially called for just $12 billion in losses while Helene was getting organized, has nearly tripled its prediction to an estimated $30 billion to $35 billion as of Monday morning. The current death toll makes it the deadliest storm since Ian in 2022. That could change as more deaths are reported in coming days.
Predicting a storm’s damage is tough business. Modelers will map a storm’s potential path across the landscape, taking into account wind, rain and storm surge, but also factoring in local construction methods, how rigorous governments are in enforcing building codes and even what kind of trees grow in a region, which can help determine how long and extensive power outages will be. In theory, a Category 5 storm will do more damage than a Category 1 storm, but it is often days or even weeks before a storm’s true destruction is clear.
(Adds death toll in fifth paragraph)
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