Paralyzing winter storms put a big chill on US economy, but how much?

HOUSTON (AP) — The deadly and widespread winter storm paralyzing much of the American East with ice, snow and cold is also taking a multi-billion dollar bite out of the U.S. economy, experts figure.

But how much? Economists and meteorologists are trying to get a handle on the disruption costs of winter weather disasters, which aren’t as easy to calculate as buildings destroyed by hurricanes, floods and fires.

“Events like this storm highlight just how interconnected our economy is with weather conditions. When major transportation hubs shut down or power grids fail, the cascading effects ripple through supply chains and business operations across multiple sectors simultaneously,” said Jacob Fooks, a research economist for Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.

Fooks said researchers don't have consensus, but most estimates suggest severe weather events collectively can cut gross domestic product by 0.5% to 2% annually — which he called “very substantial.”

With U.S. GDP at about $30 trillion annually, that would be from $150 billion to $600 billion.

One private company puts a big price tag on the storm

Most economists, meteorologists and disaster experts said it's too early to put a legitimate cost estimate on the weekend storm and upcoming week of subfreezing temperatures. But the private company AccuWeather announced that its preliminary estimate for the storm that grounded 11,400 flights is between $105 billion and $115 billion — an amount six other experts scoffed at as far too high and insufficiently detailed.

"A lot of it comes from the disruptions that occur to commerce, the cost of power outages," AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter told The Associated Press at the annual American Meteorological Society convention in a chilly Houston. "Some businesses are going to be shut down for days or a week or more."

It's why AccuWeather is calling this “the storm that shut it all down,” Porter said. By Monday, it had killed at least 25 people.

Add to that ice toppling electrical lines leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power, tree losses, damage to cars, and all those canceled flights, Porter said. He noted it will take time to reboot air travel and restore power.

Other experts say that's too high

Climate economist Adam Smith, who used to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's billion-dollar weather disaster list, said this storm will easily cost multiple billions of dollars, making it the country's first billion-dollar weather disaster of 2026.

But Smith, now a senior climate impact scientist at Climate Central, said it's nowhere near as costly as AccuWeather suggests. He said the private company has been an outlier among experts in climate impacts and economics. He pointed to the private company's initial estimate of $250 billion in damage from last year's Los Angeles wildfires. Several climate, risk and insurance groups all waited to do extensive analysis and all said the real amount was around $60 billion.

AccuWeather did not immediately respond to a follow-up message seeking comment.

So far, the most expensive winter storm on record in the U.S. is 2021's Texas ice storm, which cost about $26 billion, Smith and Fooks said. The 2016 Northeast blizzard cost about $3 billion, Fooks said.

Smith said this weekend's storm could approach the cost of the 2021 Texas storm because it is so widespread.

Some storm costs are hard to quantify

There's a big difference in the type of losses that are talked about with winter storms and other weather disasters.

Hurricanes, fires and floods cause damage to buildings, infrastructure and physical things that insurers will pay out for. In snow and ice storms, much of it is lost opportunity, which is more amorphous and harder to quantify, said Smith, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, former NOAA chief scientist Ryan Maue and former National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini.

“When we talk about the billion dollar damage, we talk about hurricane damage, we’re basically talking about insurable losses,” Maue said. “People generally aren’t renumerated for bad weather.’’

Uccellini noted it can be tricky to figure out costs of those lost opportunities, in part, because research has found there can be economic winners in winter storms — for example, the hardware store that sells more shovels and salt, and the grocery store that sells more food.

Fooks, of Colorado State, said it still seems that losses far outstrip those gains. He cited things like disruption of supply chains and business operations, response costs for emergency managers and departments of transportation, and so on.

Porter and others say regardless of how costs are calculated, they are adding up.

As the climate warms, costly weather disasters are happening “at an increasing frequency and impact around the world,” Porter said. “This is just the latest example.”

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