Disaster Fatigue 2021: US Hit With 18 Billion-Dollar Extreme Weather Events

Spectacularly costly disasters are our new normal.

Major hurricanes are devastating coastal communities and bringing flooding thousands of miles inland. Wildfires are burning for months. Heatwaves are scorching places where people don’t have air conditioning.

Events like these have all happened just this year, and they contributed to another huge annual bill of billion-dollar disasters tracked by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The cleanup and recovery from these events can take weeks, months, even years.

According to our recent analysis at Climate Central, that recovery time between events is shrinking: The United States is now averaging a billion-dollar disaster every 20 days.