The Rising Tide of Severe Storms | SERVPRO® of Eastern Rockland County

7/8/2021 (Permalink)

When storms do damage, we go to work to make things right. Contact SERVPRO of Eastern Rockland County to start the restoration process.

The year 2020 happened to be a record-setting year for bad weather. 2020 saw more weather disasters than any previous year on record, and we certainly felt the sting of it here in Rockland County.

For a weather event to be classified as a disaster, it must cause a billion dollars in damages. 2020 saw 22 such events, plus a number of other damaging storms that didn’t reach that financial benchmark.

There were so many events that the NWS had to resort to using Greek letters to name them all.

Not Just Hurricanes

Hurricanes and tropical storms (such as Isaias, which knocked out power for 2.5 million in our local region) often bear the brunt of blame for causing destruction and financial damage, but in fact the most expensive disasters of 2020 in the contiguous United States were thunderstorms and tornadoes. Of the 22 major disasters in 2020, 14 of them were thunderstorms and storm systems.

This scenario shows the potential damage of a single storm: In August 2020, what started as a normal-looking line of storms in Nebraska churned into a devastating derecho (think of a tornado, but instead of rotating winds imagine slashing, straight-line blasts) which damaged over 10 million acres of Nebraskan corn fields. That’s almost half the crop of the corn-dependent state, and over 11% of the corn crop of the entire country. 

Storms are a potential problem for everyone, and as a home or business owner, you should take all the necessary precautions to protect your property and anyone in it from dangerous storms. But should those precautions prove insufficient or ineffective in an unexpected weather disaster, remember that you’ve got a friend in the restoration industry.

When storms do damage, we go to work to make things right. Contact SERVPRO today to see how we can help.