Historical Extreme Weather Damages at the County Scale in Texas

Historical estimates of total damages from extreme weather events in Texas are used in the State Hazard Mitigation Plan and as guidance to counties by the State of Texas, are based on storm reports produced by the National Weather Service and archived by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). For many events affecting multiple counties, locations, and hazards, the damages appear to be indiscriminately distributed across multiple counties or assigned to the county specifically housing the local National Weather Service office and appears to be dependent on data source. This is a problem for resiliency and disaster management at the county and state levels. One such example is the Texas State Hazard Mitigation Plan (SHMP) relies on the distribution of monetary and human impacts drawn from the Storm Data database for assessing county-scale risk and identifying hot spots of particular vulnerability. Given apparent shortcomings in the current database an in-depth analysis was conducted for seven southeastern Texas counties from 2000-2023 consisting of the following components. A careful analysis of historical damages for the period 2000-2023 for a set of counties in Southeast Texas that are highly susceptible to natural disasters, that span a wide range of urban and rural communities, and that fall within the areas of responsibility of multiple National Weather Service offices. The comparison of analyzed damages to damages reported by the NWS and stored in national databases, in order to determine the extent and nature of discrepancies and how they vary across different types of natural disasters. Interviews with NWS employees in Houston/Galveston and Lake Charles discussed changes in procedure and reporting have taken place from 2000-2023, based on discrepancies found during the pilot study. Finally, the author team has evaluated the effort required to prepare a comprehensive analysis for the entire state of Texas.