Natural Disaster Events Exceed $1B in Damage in 2018

CoreLogic, a financial services company providing financial and property information analytics, recently released its 2018 Natural Hazard report. The report examines the impact of last year’s natural disasters on residential and commercial real estate. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there were 11 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion in the U.S. alone. Although last year’s count of billion-dollar events is a decline from the previous year, both 2017 and 2018 have tracked far above the 1980–2017 annual average of $6 billion in total dollar amount in one year.

Highlights from the analysis this year include:

• In 2018, there were over 1,600 significant flood events that occurred in the U.S., 59 percent of which were flash flood-related.
• Residential and commercial flood damage in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia from Hurricane Florence is estimated at $19 billion to $28.5 billion, of which roughly 85 percent of residential flood losses was uninsured.
• The 2018 Atlantic Hurricane season saw 15 named storms, eight of which were named. Two of these, Hurricanes Florence (Category 1) and Michael (Category 4), made landfall along the U.S. This made 2018 the third back-to-back season of above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
• The number of acres that burned in 2018 is the eighth highest in U.S. history as reported through Nov. 30, 2018.
• A total of 11 western states had at least one wildfire that exceeded 50,000 burned acres; the leading states were California and Oregon, each with seven fires that burned more than 50,000 acres.