CIRES Center for Science and Technology Policy Research offers reassessed national flood damage estimates
By Annette Varani
Pennsylvania and California lead the nation in flood damage, according to a new national database of historical flood damage estimates compiled by CIRES and NCAR researchers.
State and basin damage information have been collected with new and improved national damage estimates to provide a more accurate look at flood costs in the United States.
The new data set shows that from 1955 to 1999, Pennsylvania, with flood damages
approaching $12 billion, and California, with flood damages estimated at nearly
$11 billion, lead the nation in total flood damages. "The data indicate that
California's large damage is the sum of many damaging floods, whereas the damages
suffered in Pennsylvania resulted from a few major events," said Roger
Pielke Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
at CIRES
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. "But if you
consider population, North Dakotans have suffered most percapita economic losses
due to flooding.
"Despite programs intended to control the growing costs of such hazards,
flooding cost the United States approximately $50 billion in damages during
the 1990s alone," he said.
But no consensus has been reached on why costs continue to spiral, he said. Potential reasons for the increase include climate change, increasing population and failed policies.
"Decision makers need to understand the roles that climate, population
growth and development, and policy play in determining flood damage trends,"
Pielke said. The report, "Flood Damage in the United States, 1926-2000, A Reanalysis
of National Weather Service Estimates" was co-authored by Pielke, Mary Downton
of NCAR's Environmental and Societal Impacts Group and J. Zoe Barnard Miller
of NCAR and CU-Boulder. NOAA's Office of Global Programs sponsored the work.
Downton said policy is being made without adequate information. "Unfortunately,
available records are inadequate for policy evaluation, scientific analysis
and disaster mitigation," she said. "There are no uniform guidelines for
estimating flood losses, no central clearinghouse to collect, evaluate and
report flood damage, and the data that do exist are rough approximations that
have been reported in lots of different ways.
"Also, most damage estimates focus on national totals, but scientists
need data at river basin or community-scale levels to make sense of flood causes
and effects," she said. "The National Research Council has stressed the
importance of a comprehensive and consistent database because sound flood policymaking
depends on having a continuous-time series of damage estimates. Reliable loss
data are critical for cost-effective hazard mitigation and planning for future
disaster response." See www.flooddamagedata.org for
the report.
Related information may be found in the Extreme Weather Sourcebook, which provides a ranking of flood damages by state and easy-to-read graphs of each state's damage due to floods, hurricanes and tornadoes.
See sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/sourcebook/ for details.
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