Ida is raining out over Mississippi/Alabama/Tennessee, still causing flooding and impacts across the south …

The remnants of Hurricane Nora are also causing flooding in the southwest – it’s the blob of rain over Arizona, having made landfall in Mexico and causing about 300 million in impacts. Elsewhere, Tropical Storm Kate is in the mid Atlantic, due to move north and dissipate. Likewise, a tropical wave (INVEST AL90) following behind it will probably become a named storm, but will also likely follow the same track and not bother anybody but fish and shipping.
Ida’s economic impacts continue to rise. When looking at economics it’s important to be clear what you mean. The storm probably caused about $28 Billion in damage in terms of simple direct physical damage value. There are some big unknowns – while it appears several key refineries avoided damage, yesterday a flood control structure failed and one refinery was flooded. And there is no word yet about the vital Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) and its onshore support equipment. That alone could have huge ramifications both directly and indirectly.
Another big issue is that things are rarely rebuilt exactly as they were – for one thing, construction codes change over time. As one example, there are regulations that say that if a structure is more than 50% damaged it must be rebuilt to meet new flood zone codes, which can cause a home that would have cost $100,000 to repair or replace to cost $300,000 or more to rebuild. Delays can also cause damage to increase, as well as increase secondary impacts like lost wages. For example, if power is out and supplies slow to reach an area, additional damage can be inflicted from even relatively mild follow-on rainstorms. Secondary economic impacts are even more tricky to compute, and depend heavily on the decisions make by local, state, and federal authorities, as well as the “hidden hand” of the economy and investors. Demand inflation is often a factor – when supplies are short, prices go up. And while regulators try to prevent it, price gouging and opportunism sneak in whenever they can.
When you put all this together, the current estimates for Ida are in the $45 Billion range. It could rise as high as $60 Billion depending on the unknowns like the oil and gas infrastructure that has yet to be surveyed, how long the power stays out, and what regulators and officials do. A final issue is what Congress does. The Hurricane Sandy relief bill included money for salmon farms in Washington State, all the way across the country from where the storm hit! That and other pork are often included in the Sandy numbers, and the Katrina impact number often includes $20 Billion in mitigation spending (which, while obviously needed, should have been spent before the storm: it wasn’t caused by the storm). So the price gouging and opportunism (and when we’re lucky needed improvements) that follows storms like the mosquitoes sometimes wears fancy suits and has high end offices on K Street …