Hurricane Michael Produced $5 Billion In Losses To Aircraft, Infrastructure At Tyndall AFB Alone

As Hurricane Michael quickly gained strength over unusually warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico in October, Tyndall Air Force Base began sending its stealth fighters to safer bases—all but the more than a dozen planes undergoing maintenance. Two days later, the base was being ripped apart by 155 mile-per-hour winds that left it littered with the twisted metal of torn-away rooftops and hangars. The hurricane—one of at least a dozen climate and weather disasters in United States this year to top $1 billion in damage—left a wide trail of destruction through homes, businesses and farms from Florida to the Carolinas.

The military alone suffered several billion dollars in damage. During a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Dec. 12, Sen. Tim Kaine said the price tag for damage at Tyndall Air Force Base was about $5 billion, as he understood it. That added to earlier damage from Hurricane Florence: U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller estimated that rebuilding properly after Florence's damage to Camp Lejeune would cost about $3.6 billion.

"It's not just sea level rise," Kaine said. "There's all kinds of weather emergencies and challenges that all of the services are dealing with on the climate side."

Even before Hurricane Michael struck, 2018 was on track to have among the highest number of billion-dollar extreme weather events since federal officials began tallying them that way in 1980. While the cumulative costs haven't yet been calculated for 2018, states and insurers have estimated the damage from several individual storms. North Carolina reported Hurricane Florence caused nearly $17 billion in damage in that state alone when it stalled over the coast in September, bringing 30 inches of rain in some areas and sending rivers over their banks and into towns and homes.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18122018/tyndall-military-hurricane-cost-2018-year-review-billion-dollar-disasters-wildfire-extreme-weather-drought-michael-florence