US: Failure to prepare for extreme weather costs billions

"One only needs to read the newspapers to affirm that in the face of named storms and other extreme weather events, large numbers of assets, and the communities that are defined by these assets and which support them, are not sufficiently resilient," Lindene Patton, chief climate product officer at Zurich Insurance Group, said in testimony prepared in advance of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing that took place on the 12th February, reports USA Today.

A Department of Homeland Security official told a Senate panel that "Failing to prepare for extreme weather events has cost the United States $1.15 trillion in economic losses from 1980 to 2010 and could cost another trillion in coming years."