Natural Disasters

        The United States is praised for having the largest economy globally, but how much of the national land is actually supporting their success before it becomes an expense? The NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) divides the US into six different weather disaster categories by measuring the effects each one has on social and economic systems. There are a lot of different environmental disasters that occur but severe storms (41.06%), droughts (22.23%), winter storms (13.92%), hurricanes (9.83%), flooding’s (6.79%), and wildfires (6.17%) are looked at the closest as they are the most common and cause the most damage. The NCEI tracked national weather patterns from 1980-2018 finding that the Federal Disaster Relief was consistently going over their budget by billions to restore the land and people's well being affected by these disasters. Unfortunately, it is apparent that natural disasters are continuing to appear more frequently and in a more extreme mannerism. In this study, a comprehensive legend was used to connect all of the data on a national level with three graphs to visualize these findings. 

        On the first medium the bar chart is representative of the damage expenses the US faced for each disaster with the measurements in billions. The highest cost was $265,699 billion dollars for droughts even though severe storms occurred almost twice as frequently. When most people in the US think of the repercussions of a drought what comes to mind is no drinking water, showers, sprinklers for green lawns, and dried up swimming pools but really it’s failing agriculture. Extreme drought causes crops to fail and no drinking water for livestock to survive. In class we watched the documentary Cowspiracy, which discussed how human consumption of animal products is not sustainable for our environment. What stuck out to me the most was the leading cause of deforestation is livestock, every minute 7 million pounds of excrement is produced by animals being farmed for food causing greenhouse gas emission, and the meat and dairy industry use ⅓ of the earth's fresh water (Anderson & Kuhn, 2014). Extreme drought won’t allow for crops to grow, and when crops don’t grow animals cannot be fed, and when animals cannot be fed they are unable to survive, and when animals do not survive animal producing companies go under. Minus ethically this is an issue cost wise because now the government is not getting paid taxes on the land that was used for agriculture and lost a potential tax profit on the final product because the company went under. The other scenario, which is more common is the government approves for excess groundwater pumping to irrigate existing agriculture to take place but that comes at an exponential cost (NCDC, 2017). Animal product earnings account for over $100 billion annually and rely solely on sustainable land (USDA, 2019). Since this is a billion dollar industry water irrigation is more likely to happen for crops than it is other natural resources. According to the NOAA the natural disaster with the lowest cost is wildfires, at $19,887 billion dollars. Wildfires typically stem from droughts due to a lack of moisture in plant life. So the most costly natural disaster is causing the least costly to be more money than it should be. Focusing to help one of these categories to become less frequent will roll over to benefiting all of the other ones because they are all environmentally connected. 

        On the second medium the text table variables were the category of disaster, deaths, and number of events measured in thousands. There were 41,501 severe storms, 22,464 droughts, 14,064 winter storms, 9,936 hurricanes, 6,864 floods, and 6,240 wildfires that occurred in the US from 1980-2018. These high numbers are putting a huge economical strain on our society as it is causing significant money loss, injuries, and displacement of people. On the table it shows 6,704,199 people died from these disasters, which doesn’t even include injuries. Our World is a data source that tracks trends of natural resources globally and wrote an article “Natural Disasters,” which discusses each category worldwide and in the US. Natural Disasters calls people out who live in the United States because they have this mindset that due to living in a developed country they are out of harm's way but natural disasters happen globally and no matter where you are located you are not in the clear. Most people have insurance so if something were to ever happen to them they are more focused on cost and aren’t really recognizing that their life is at risk. On the text table the amount of deaths seem incredibly high, but natural disasters only make up less than 0.1% of total deaths. What stands out though is the low frequency high impact connection (Ritchie & Roser, 2019). This means hurricanes and floods don’t happen often but when they do they can cause a high number of deaths quickly. As more natural disasters continue to increase our high impact death rate will also continue to increase. 

        On the third medium a map of the US lays out exactly where each category disaster happened in each state. The variables used were category of disaster, state, deaths, number of events (measured in thousands) and estimated costs (measured in billions). Every state in the US has experienced at least one of these natural disasters and a lot of experiences more than just one. Although flooding is the second least frequent disaster on the custom legend it has occurred in every state except New Mexico and Wyoming. Aeris, a weather logging company discusses the increasing flooding problem in the article “Flooding Frequency and Intensity are Increasing.” The main issue discussed is other natural disasters are causing this issue such as severe storms and hurricanes. More severe storms are occurring because there is more moisture and those severe storms are causing excessive rainfall. A warmer atmosphere has resulted in a 7% increase in water vapor floating overhead (Douglas, 2018). On top of that sea levels are rising, wiping out towns and predicted to wipe out cities in 2050. The US government cannot afford to be making their budget bigger to accommodate these new and predicting disaster effects. In 2018 alone there was $480 million in damaged homes in Iowa, where there continues to be more frequent flooding issues (CBC, 2019). Since all of these natural disasters are continuing at an increasing rate the government is having issue planning for future disasters because they are too caught up in trying to fix past ones. The Federal Disaster Relief, is not getting any more money from the government for their budget and are stuck at a roadblock to fix future issues.