List of disasters by cost
Wikimedia list article
Disasters can have high costs associated with responding to and recovering from them. This page lists the estimated economic costs of relatively recent disasters.
The costs of disasters vary considerably depending on a range of factors, such as the geographical location where they occur. When a large disaster occurs in a wealthy country, the financial damage may be large, but when a comparable disaster occurs in a poorer country, the actual financial damage may appear to be relatively small. This is in part due to the difficulty of measuring the financial damage in areas that lack insurance. For example, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, with a death toll of around 230,000 people, cost a "mere" $15 billion, whereas in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which 11 people died, the damage was six times higher.
The most expensive disaster in human history is the Chernobyl disaster, costing an estimated $700 billion. Chernobyl's circumstances make it a unique but particularly devastating situation that is unlikely to ever happen again. Estimations have only increased over time, with the recent figure coming from the release of new government data up to 2016. Furthermore, the cost is expected to perpetually increase for several thousand years as cleanup operations and the economic impact of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone continue indefinitely.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “List of disasters by cost” is wikimedia list article. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through List, disasters and cost, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of disasters by cost” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.