Hurricane Yan is considered the costliest natural disaster in the US in 2022.

CAPE CORAL, Florida. Hurricane Ian was the costliest U.S. disaster in 2022, according to a NOAA report released Tuesday. The total cost of the hurricane was $112.9 billion. It also ranks it as the third costliest hurricane since 1980 for the US, behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

“From 2016 to 2022, the United States was impacted by 122 separate events worth billions of dollars or more,” says applied climate scientist Adam Smith of NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information. “And if you add it all together, that’s over 5,000 dead and over $1 trillion in damage. It is both insured and uninsured.”

Over the past few years, many of these disasters have hit tropical systems, including 5 of the last 6 years when the United States was hit by a major hurricane. Smith says we have never had such a high frequency of high class hurricanes hitting the United States since 1951.

“We have a lot of vulnerabilities along the coast, but these hurricanes are of course intensifying quickly,” Smith said. “Many times they slow down and fall by themselves. So this is definitely a growing risk issue.

This risk became a reality for southwest Florida last September due to Hurricane Ian.

“Storm surge on the coast, of course, strong winds, but even heavy rainfall and well flooding inland,” Smith said. “Of course, these areas do not have high flood insurance rates. Exposure, population, Yang’s intensity all combined to create a really powerful storm that made it into the record books.”

Smith says Ian joins a growing list of high-class hurricanes that have changed the mitigation landscape for the state of Florida since Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

“What went well, what didn’t. Take the best practice. Build for the future, not the past or the present, because it will pay off as we move into the future,” Smith said. “We know that we will continue to have a wild variety of these extremes that will affect many different areas of our country.”

In 2022, Hurricane Yan was one of the $18 billion disasters in the United States, totaling about $165 billion, making it the most costly year on record, surpassed only by 2017 and 2005. These disasters also resulted in the death of at least 474 people.