The cleanup continues in Florida from Ian, which the majority of Floridians will tell you is “the worst hurricane I’ve ever lived through.” The total economic impact is still undetermined, the damage assessments continue, and the death toll rises, but here are some of the early measures of Ian’s catastrophic impact, via Reuters:
DEATH TOLL
As of Monday morning, at least 85 deaths had been attributed to the storm, including 81 in Florida, which took the brunt of Ian’s power when the storm slammed into the state’s Gulf Coast last Wednesday as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (240 km per hour).
More than half of the reported fatalities occurred in coastal Lee County, where officials have defended their decision not to order evacuations sooner. The death toll is expected to keep rising as search teams reach more areas cut off by floodwaters and debris. Hundreds of people stranded by the storm have been rescued.
Rescue crews have visited about 45,000 homes and businesses in affected areas, Kevin Guthrie, the state’s emergency management director, told reporters on Monday. “We’ve been to about every address,” he said. “Now we are going back for a second look.”
PROPERTY DAMAGE
Insurers are anticipating between $42 billion and $57 billion in losses, risk modeling firm Verisk said on Monday. That total, which includes damage from wind, storm surge and flooding, excludes losses covered by the U.S. government’s National Flood Insurance Program or costs associated with litigation, among other elements. Those could bring the top end of the estimated range closer to $60 billion, Verisk said. Virtually all of the losses stem from Florida.
CoreLogic, a U.S. property data and analytics company, estimated the insured losses in Florida at between $28 billion and $47 billion on Friday, when Ian was taking aim at South Carolina (which could also reach into the billions) after marching across Florida.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
What’s more, the storm also stands to take a bite out of national gross domestic product growth in the near term. As CNN reports, Gregory Daco, chief economist with EY Parthenon, has projected that Hurricane Ian could have a -0.3 percentage point impact on third-quarter GDP and bring down fourth-quarter GDP by 0.1 percentage points.
Taking Ian’s estimated impact into account, Daco now projects GDP growth of 1.7% in the third quarter and a contraction of 1.4% in the fourth quarter. “You have power outages, you have flight cancellations, you have disruptions to energy extraction and refinement, you have disruptions to crops — all of those are part of normal economic activity,” Daco said. And some of that lost economic activity is never regained or even fully replaced by reconstruction efforts, he said.
Although an immense effort of reconstruction and repair work will be undertaken, and that effort will bolster economic output, the benefits will filter out over multiple months, he added. “In terms of the impact on growth, it’s likely to be invisible, relative to the national economy,” he said.
The magnitude of impact to local economies and to key tourism-centric industries in Florida and South Carolina are likely to be “severe,” according to Matthew Martin, a US economist with Oxford Economics. “Damage to Florida’s and South Carolina’s leisure and hospitality, retail trade and health care industries will be key for assessing the economic impact, since they collectively account for about 20% of each state’s GDP and 40% of jobs,” Martin wrote in a note published Friday.
Noting the hurricane “does not pose a major threat to the US economy,” Martin wrote that the supply chain stress is expected to be relatively modest. The ports of Florida and Charleston, South Carolina, process less than 10% of total US imports, and some have already resumed operations, he wrote.
Still, the impacts will be felt by a wide range of industries — among them aerospace, health care, electronics, automotive, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and manufacturing — at a time when supply chains are trying to recover from disruptions caused by the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine, said Bindiya Vakil, chief executive officer of Resilinc, which provides supply chain modeling and risk-management software to companies like IBM, General Motors and Amgen.
More than 4,600 facilities and more than 74,000 different types of parts are located in the affected areas in Florida, she said. “Ripple effects from [these types of events] can last for more than five to six months,” she said.
The affected parts cannot make it on time to factories that are relying on their delivery, Vakil said. Without these raw materials, those factories cannot deliver in time to their customers, she added, noting these disruptions could prove especially painful in industries such as consumer electronics and automotive. “These industries are already reeling from the semiconductor shortage,” she said.
CONTINUING POWER AND WATER OUTAGES
Around 600,000 homes and businesses remained without power in Florida early on Monday. The storm knocked out power to more than four million customers in Florida. Ian also left more than 1.1 million homes and businesses in North and South Carolina without power over the weekend, though most of those customers have since had their power restored.
There were more than 140 boil-water advisories in effect across Florida on Monday, including for all of Lee and Charlotte counties, two of the hardest-hit areas. The state dispatched 20 trucks carrying 1.2 million gallons (5.5 million liters) of water to support hospitals in Lee County without potable water, the office of Governor Ron DeSantis said. More than 7,000 patients have been evacuated from more than 150 healthcare facilities, state officials said on Monday.
HARD-HIT AREAS
Florida’s Gulf Coast sustained the most damage after Ian crashed ashore on the barrier island of Cayo Costa Island. Other barrier islands such as Sanibel Island and Fort Myers Beach, both popular vacation destinations, saw homes swept away, buildings torn apart and boats washed onto streets. Parts of the causeway connecting Sanibel Island to the mainland collapsed, while the bridge between Pine Island – just north of Sanibel – and the mainland was also damaged, cutting both islands off.
Coastal cities such as Fort Myers, Port Charlotte and Naples suffered significant storm surge. The storm’s heavy rainfall also brought floodwaters inland, including to Orlando and the surrounding communities, and central Florida could see record river flooding this week, according to the National Weather Service.
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