00:00AccuWeather, Vice President of Forecasting Operations, Dan DePonowitz, joins us right now with a look at the storm's impact.
00:05And, Dan, what comes next?
00:07Damian, the storm has moved out of the way here, finally getting a break.
00:11It was a very long period of time of coastal flooding.
00:14In fact, about four or five high tide cycles with significant coastal inundation.
00:18And for that reason, along with some flooding, rainfall, and just really some significant property damage along the east coast of the U.S.,
00:26AccuWeather has released our exclusive AccuWeather economic damage and loss estimate for this tropical wind and rainstorm.
00:33$3 billion is our preliminary estimate here, so certainly an impactful disaster and one that we've been forecasting for the last week or so here,
00:42really driving home the impacts, although it was not a named tropical system, one that AccuWeather called a tropical wind and rainstorm,
00:49to drive home the impacts of coastal flooding and strong damaging winds in some spots over the last couple of days.
00:55That's right, Dan.
00:56And we were talking about, you were talking about the tides that we were dealing with as well,
00:59but we also had a king tide earlier this week before the storm even started to really have the impacts,
01:05and that made the impacts almost worse as the storm worked its way across the region.
01:10It did.
01:11We had the king tides in these that were last week, so that set the stage really with higher water levels.
01:16Places along the Jersey coast down to the parts of the Delmarva picked up or experienced several feet of coastal inundation that lingered for 48 hours or more in some places,
01:30and that salt water, even though salt water can retreat, the lingering salt left over there can cause significant trouble in terms of the damage to homes and properties well after the floodwaters have receded.
01:43So for that reason, sort of this longer-term impacts that this economic impact takes into account as well.
01:48This map here is showing some of the other billion-dollar disasters that AccuWeather has released exclusive estimates for this year.
01:54We had, obviously, early in the year the significant devastating wildfires in California.
01:59You can get a sense sort of at the scale of these different disasters with a few billion here with this latest tropical wind and rainstorm to 10 billion or so
02:06with the tornado outbreak earlier this spring, and some of the higher amounts, the severe storms and flooding in April,
02:12and then the most costly disaster so far this year, really, again, the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires in January.
02:18And, Dan, this kind of reemphasizes what we here at AccuWeather really try to express to our viewers and to all of the folks who tune in,
02:29because even though this wasn't a named storm, that, in your mind, it may mean that, hey,
02:34you may not necessarily need to have to pay attention or heed the warnings or local advisories for the storm because it doesn't have a name.
02:39But here at AccuWeather, we do something different.
02:42We do.
02:42We have the AccuWeather Real Impact Scale for Hurricanes, Damien, and that's a really, in the exclusive scale,
02:47really helps to communicate the full risk associated with these types of storms.
02:51In the case of this tropical wind and rainstorm, there were wind gusts over 60 miles an hour in many different states,
02:56a couple of gusts near 70 miles per hour in parts of the northeast, 11 or near 11 inches of rain in parts of the Carolinas.
03:03We had mentioned, as we mentioned, the several feet of coastal inundation, storm surge that really went into many areas for several days.
03:09And that's why we rated this a one when there is no rating from the Saffir-Simpson Scale for Hurricanes.
03:14So, again, another differentiator here of AccuWeather.
03:17All right, AccuWeather Senior Director of Forecast Operations Dan DePodwin, thank you so much for joining us,
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