AccuWeather has updated their estimate of the damage from the LA fires to $150 billion. Here's what the league table looks like now:
The AccuWeather estimate increased from $55 billion to $150 billion in one day.
11 thoughts on “Update: LA fires now costliest in recent history”
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I'm curious, how does AccuWeather calculate the numbers?
Well 10,000 houses at one million dollars each is $10 billion so it isn't clear how you get to $150 billion.
Yes, Accuweather???
That’s a fair question. It’s a lot more than just houses. Schools, office buildings, apartment complexes, other infrastructure, etc have all been destroyed. Those kind of things can rack up quickly.
It will easily wind up topping Katrina's up-to-$200 billion, making it the costliest weather-related natural disaster I can think of. I'd guess closer to half a trillion in the end. For scale, the Pandemic was also a natural disaster, which the NIH puts the cost of at $16 trillion.
I guess the number of $10+ million homes destroyed may impact the total cost of this disaster. CA homeowner's insurance is going to go up in a big way (hopefully not too much in SD, where my son and grandchildren live).
Better call FEMA now if you need help, since Orange Mussolini may pull all the aid on Jan 20th. I suppose he needs the CA MAGA congressional support to pass his "fuck over the poor to retain big tax cuts for the rich" agenda, so perhaps he will act rationally (imagine a multiple number of laughing emojis if I knew how to do that)
Hard to even quantify (and qualify) the damage, the fires are still huge, just the Palisades fire may end up burning most of the brush from Brentwood to Ventura County, as firefighters focus on holding lines and perimeters to keep neighborhoods and natural gas lines from getting gobbled up.
Hopefully it doesn't get up into Encino and Sherman Oaks, or damage will rise even more precipitously.
I believe that amounts to insurance companies profits for 2024.
Sitting here in Northern California, looking at my property tax assessment, ~20% of it is the house itself, and 80% of it is the land. While the fires destroy the structures, they don't destroy the land as such. So what figures get used when computing these figures?
I was wondering that myself. But I suppose they are counting all costs, not just costs to insurers. I don’t even know how to count the economic costs of the massive amounts of toxic cleanup that will have to be done and the costs of fighting the fire and how that’s calculated. And the economic costs of school and business closures/disruptions. I have family down there and I can tell you that they, and probably everyone in the city is stressed. How much business disruption does that account for? Is that somehow counted?
But for sure the costs are more than just how much the destroyed structures were worth.
By comparison, Biden’s Build Back Better act has about $62 billion for climate resilience over 10 years.
When Republicans say that fighting climate change is too expensive and will kill our economy, remember the cost of these fires.