Even as the full scale of devastation in the mountainous regions of North Carolina and Tennessee remains unknown, it’s clear that Hurricane Helene is one of the deadliest and most destructive storms in recent U.S. history. As of Friday, the storm had caused at least 180 deaths and destroyed or damaged many thousands of homes and other buildings.
In a preliminary damage estimate released on Thursday, the private forecaster AccuWeather pegged the financial cost of Hurricane Helene’s damages at $225 to $250 billion, more than double what it estimated in the first days after the storm made landfall in Florida last week — and far more than recent major hurricanes like 2012’s Sandy and 2017’s Harvey. That massive number includes the cost of rebuilding homes, businesses, roads, and infrastructure in the storm’s path from Florida to Tennessee, as well as the wages and economic output that will be lost during the yearslong rebuild.
Another fact that makes Helene’s devastation so unprecedented is that almost none of those hundreds of billions of dollars in losses will be pa... Read more
