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CausticNox t1_ivps8wp wrote

Does this count inflation and population increases in high-risk areas? I would think more people = more property to be damaged.

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USAFacts_Official OP t1_ivptrhk wrote

This doesn't 100% answer your question, but since damage to homes, businesses, and government buildings goes into these estimates, then it's likely a safe assumption that places with more population will have more of these structures and higher costs. This is from the article:

>The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is responsible for calculating the costs of individual natural disasters. There are three main categories of direct or indirect costs that go into these estimates. These include physical damage to homes, businesses and government buildings, damage to property inside these buildings, and the costs associated with businesses being shut down or people losing their homes.
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>The cost estimates don’t include environmental damages, any physical or mental healthcare costs, or larger supply chain impacts. The government also doesn’t attempt to put a price tag on the lives lost during a disaster.
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>Because of the way disaster costs are calculated, the estimated totals are considered conservative evaluations. The true costs associated with natural disasters are difficult to capture due to the lack of immediate data and the hard-to-measure long-term costs.

And to answer the inflation question, the data here is adjusted for 2021 dollars.

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Poke-Party t1_ivr4wlb wrote

As someone that is responsible for entering the some of the weather related data that goes into these figures I can tell you these numbers are very much conservative estimates. Many times we do not know the details of structures that are damaged and many times do not even hear of all the damage that occurs. Most of the time I am just trying to aim for the right order of magnitude but almost always stay toward the lower end of what seems reasonable as an estimate.

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