FARGO — Weather is getting increasingly expensive and it is making property insurance less affordable. A report in the Des Moines Register this past week indicated that extreme weather such as tornadoes, floods and thunderstorm winds have produced some $550 million in damage already this year across Iowa. The Register states that Iowa residents have filed 85,725 insurance claims for $480 million in damages and another 6,500 have qualified for $60 million in FEMA assistance.
Things are worse in other states. Wildfires across the west, flooding in the east, and hurricanes in coastal areas are all causing a steadily rising annual property damage loss. The reasons are multiple. Climate change is causing more extreme weather. At the same time, it is getting more expensive to fix damaged property, in part because of a trend of building lavish homes in disaster prone locations. We are not being smart about this as a nation.
John Wheeler is Chief Meteorologist for WDAY, a position he has had since May of 1985. Wheeler grew up in the South, in Louisiana and Alabama, and cites his family’s move to the Midwest as important to developing his fascination with weather and climate. Wheeler lived in Wisconsin and Iowa as a teenager. He attended Iowa State University and achieved a B.S. degree in Meteorology in 1984. Wheeler worked about a year at WOI-TV in central Iowa before moving to Fargo and WDAY..
