Geneva:
Hurricane Ida, which slammed into the US Gulf Coast at the weekend, could turn out to be the costliest climate disaster on record, the UN stated Wednesday, hailing although that prevention measures had significantly restricted casualties.
Louisiana and Mississippi are nevertheless taking stock of the disaster inflicted by the effective Category 4 storm that hit precisely 16 years just after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and devastated the location.
Ida is recognized to have killed 4 people today, even though the death count is anticipated to rise, and knocked out energy for more than a million properties across Louisiana.
“There is a chance that the economic cost will be higher then Katrina,” Petteri Taalas, who heads the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told reporters in Geneva.
He pointed as an illustration to the “major damage to the electric system in Louisiana.”
Until now, Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people today and destroyed massive components of New Orleans, had been deemed by far the costliest climate-connected disaster.
A fresh WMO report that examined mortality and financial losses from climate, climate and water extremes amongst 1970 and 2019, located that Katrina had raked in almost $164 billion in financial losses.
Currently, hurricanes Harvey and Maria, which each hit in 2017, are deemed the second and third-costliest climate-connected disasters, carrying value tags of almost $97 billion and more than $69 billion respectively.
Taalas stated it would most likely take a month or more ahead of a complete price estimate for the losses brought on by Ida could be made.
But he hailed that enhanced early warning and flood protection systems as effectively as evacuation procedures appeared to have saved quite a few lives.
“The good news when it comes to Ida is that the casualties as compared to Katrina, they were much lower,” Taalas stated.
Mami Mizutori, who heads the UN workplace for disaster danger reduction, agreed.
She told reporters that the variations amongst the impacts of the two storms showed the value of investing in prevention.
“The economic loss indeed will be quite big, but the good news is that … the mortality has been very, very low, and this is because the city of New Orleans and Louisiana … invested in prevention.”
What had made the most significant distinction given that Katrina, she stated, was the $14.5 billion invested in developing flood walls and levees as portion of a new “hurricane and storm damage risk-reduction system.”
“They did not wait for another century to do this. They did it very quickly.”
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