Earthquakes Are the Costliest Natural Disaster

Kevin Kliesen: OK. So predictability, preparedness, duration, location-- those kind of are three key factors that sort of determine the size of the economic loss and disruption and damage. Now, if you look at the data-- and I really didn't know how else to show this rather than table form, but this looks at the 40 most costly insurance losses from 1970 to 2016. This is from Swiss Re, the insurance company I mentioned earlier.

So what you're looking at, hurricanes, you have 20, 30, 40. Half of all of the costliest insurance losses were stemming from hurricanes. The average insurance loss in 2016 dollars-- we're putting these all on the same dollar terms so you can compare dollars across time-- a little less than $15 billion. That's the insured loss. And then the average economic loss was about $29 billion, and the average number of victims was 372.

Earthquakes, not quite as numerous but about the same in terms of insured losses. But if you look at total economic losses, almost three times as large as hurricanes. And then the average number of victims is substantially larger.

And then you go on and through other sort of floods and summer storms.

And then here's 9/11, just for comparison purposes. Insured losses, about $26 billion, but uninsured losses/total economic losses were considerably larger. So the total losses were somewhere around $132 billion, with almost 3,000 people losing their lives. So that includes New York and Washington and Pennsylvania.