They don't source, and the numbers seem high, but qualitatively?
https://jaxtoday.org/2024/10/17/hurricane-milton-numbers/

@Manifold do the changes Matt has recently made to the description also apply to the sweeps market?

The Milton losses will likely total far below CoreLogic’s estimated losses of up to $47.5 billion from Hurricane Helene, which came only two weeks before Milton. But it could still make Milton one of the 10 costliest hurricanes to ever hit the United States in terms of insured losses, including the losses covered by the NFIP.

Hurricane Milton’s losses of up to $34 billion could make it one of the costliest storms in US history

-CNN

CoreLogic: Hurricane Milton Wind, Flood Cause an Estimated $17B to $28B in Insured Losses After Unusual Landfall Activity (Press Release 10/17/2024)

---

CoreLogic: Final Estimated Damages for Hurricane Helene to be Between $30.5 Billion and $47.5 Billion (Press Release 10/04/2024)

The estimated range of insured and uninsured damages in these reports overlap, which would resolve this no

@Nightsquared "If there’s a range of damages, this will look at the top of the range for both storms. If this is a tie, it will Resolve NO."

Lower Range:
Milton = $17B
Helene = $28B

Upper Range:
Milton = $28B

Helene = $47.5B

The only overlap with those set of numbers is Helene Lower With Milton Upper. There is no tie of "top of the range" with these numbers from this source.
This is only one set of numbers though, other sources in wiki might use others too.

@DistinctlySkeptical
> If there are overlapping ranges, or there’s no clear consensus and they’re listed as being equally damaging, this will Resolve NO
If the lower end of one range is lower than the higher end of another range, the ranges are overlapping. The range for insured and uninsured for Milton is $21 billion to $34 billion, so they overlap.

Milton should be more costly based on the damage of the roof of the Tropicana Stadium alone, but I’m not sure it’ll be updated in time for the close date.

@10thOfficial is that true? for how much more than the value of the stadium are these things insured? 10x? isnt tropicana stadium like a $500m facility MAX? it would need to be insured several times over for it to be so large of a part of the damage costs?

@10thOfficial as far as I can tell total cost of a hurricane doesn’t just include insurance claims. So things like repairing the freaking Blue Ridge highway should count too.

The resolving date is set as Oct 28th currently but it looks like Milton was downgraded on the 11th/12th of the month. thus making the 28th a little more than 2 weeks. perhaps im wrong

but either way, will the resolution date be moving forward or staying on the 28th? I'm beginning now to think maybe the resolution date for this question might be a factor because milton damage cost reporting is low, and the Helene reported damages on Wikipedia have jumped over the past 2 days!

@NoahRich correct, according to Wunderground, Milton was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone on Oct 10th at 18:00 GMT. This market will close on the 24th. Updated.

@mattyb Thanks for answering! As much as I still believe the Milton damages will come in higher after everything is more clear, I may sell my no's and buy in on Yes given the timeline... the reporting on milton feels unusually slow! or maybe helene was just fast, unsure!

@mattyb if you were to resolve today, would the information available on Wikipedia be sufficient?

@NicoDelon I would consider a few different sources before resolving, per my comment here. I’ve updated the description to clarify that.

@mattyb What if the sources disagree? Wikipedia is still showing Helene as more costly...

Yeah, from what I can tell Helene may still have the greater average estimated cost and greater upper bound, but I would imagine the true cost will take longer than a couple more weeks to figure out.

Most of the sources that I've found discussing Milton's costs were before the hurricane actually hit and were about estimated costs in worst-case scenarios.

Finding good cost estimates (with a casual Google search) has been challenging.

@StevenRouk Yup. The current price seems insane to me and merely based on the unsourced screenshot below.

@Prin

What if the sources disagree?

Per my comment here,

i think relying on the same source for estimates of the damage makes sense, and should be fair. i’ll likely consult a few sources to see how they report the damage from both storms (Wikipedia included). if there’s no clear consensus of which did more damage, i may resolve this to 50:50.

If there’s really no clear consensus, and sources are giving me overlapping ranges (e.g. Milton >40M and Helene >35M in one and Milton >30M and Helene >35M from another), or the majority are listing them at the same amount, this will Resolve 50:50, update, reading back my initial description, this will Resolve NO if Helene is not clearly more damaging.

The description should now read correctly.

Helene came in at $30B in claims, Milton estimated at $30-50B, mostly due to demand surge, where builders have to pay extra to get supplies as local sources have been tapped out for Helene repairs. Milton hitting a more occupied area also played a role.

@WilliamGunn Yeah the odds on this question seemed shocking to me initially given just the property values and density of where milton made landfall compared to helene.

but i always assume there's something idk still, im. neg on this app for a reason lol. maybe one of those considerations is that because florida is more hurricane prepared(?)

What if places were damaged in Helene and then not fixed but then damaged in Milton as well? Who gets "credit"? They barely had time to fix anything. Seems very tricky.

@EmilyBemily i assume that’s complexity that the damage assessors will be tackling

Are you using insured damages or estimates of uninsured damages or both combined?

@Pjfkh i’m using Wikipedia. Wikipedia is using this:

In 2018, Roger A. Pielke Jr. and Christopher Landseapublished a peer-reviewed study in the scientific journalNature Sustainability, which gave an estimate of the direct economic losses in the continental United States from 1900 to 2017 from each hurricane if that same event was to occur under contemporary (2017) societal conditions.[8] The general formula for normalized losses is

where is reported damage in current-year US dollars, is the GDP deflator for inflation adjustment, is an estimate of current-cost net stock of fixed assets and consumer durable goods to capture changes in real wealth per-capita, and county population adjustment.

@mattyb Wikipedia doesn't seem to show the normalized cost for hurricanes after 2017. Also, it seems like the nominal cost comes from reporting, and these reports can vary wildly even for the same hurricane:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/hurricane/helene-is-2nd-deadliest-u-s-hurricane-in-50-years-could-cost-250-billion/1698452
https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/catastrophe/moodys-rms-estimates-11-billion-in-private-insured-losses-from-hurricane-helene-508750.aspx
The wiki page seems to mostly use insured losses, but for some hurricanes it seems to use uninsured losses. From the source for Hurricane Ida:

As a clearer picture of Ida’s devastation emerged, the hurricane likely caused $50 billion to $60 billion in total damage, estimated Karen Clark, who has calculated catastrophic risk since 1987. Her risk modeling company, Karen Clark and Company, figured just $18 billion of those losses would be insured.

Ida is listed at $75.2 billion in nominal damage

@Nightsquared Have the people managing the hurricane page said how they choose what source to use?

@Nightsquared @traders reading through the Wiki comments, they seem to use a variety of sources.

i think relying on the same source for estimates of the damage makes sense, and should be fair. i’ll likely consult a few sources to see how they report the damage from both storms (Wikipedia included). if there’s no clear consensus of which did more damage, i may resolve this to 50:50.

does anyone object to that?