Noted: This is the planet now. Of the seven major storm regions on Earth, five had their strongest storms on record since 2013. And any of them, or any other storm, could be worse depending on if or where it comes ashore. “Irma, we had a chance of having a $500 billion disaster, had it taken the eastern track along the Florida coastline,” says Shane Hubbard, a disaster researcher at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Generally we plan for the 1-percent annual chance flood, and in Houston we had an event that was so far from that, how do we plan and prepare? Should we? Did they just flip a coin and win a $500 billion jackpot?”
Office of Strategic Communication