NebraskaPatriot

Happy Holidays!!!

Hope that your holidays are filled with family and friends.

We will gather back together again in January for what should be a very interesting 2012.

 

 

Remembering 2011 - Weather

As the end of 2011 draws near, it's interesting to go back sometimes, and remember. Our every day lives occur at such a fast rate that we sometimes forget and 2011 certainly was a year with some amazing weather events.

In a recent Wall Street Journal on-line article, authors Erik Holm and Leslie Scism write about the devastating weather related disasters in 2011 and the costs inflicted by those events:

"A tsunami floods over a breakwater in Miyako, Japan, in March. Insured losses from the earthquake and tsunami reached $35 billion. The disasters that plagued the globe this year will send 2011 into the record books as the most costly year for catastrophes on record. Japan's powerful tsunami, earthquakes in New Zealand, floods in Thailand and a series of severe tornadoes in the U.S. all contributed to $350 billion in disaster losses, according to a new estimate from reinsurance company Swiss Re AG.

Insured losses from U.S. tornadoes , including both April storms in Southeast and May storms in Midwest, totaled $14 billion.

The insured damage from the Joplin tornadoes totaled $6.7 billion, according to Swiss Re, the fifth costliest event of the year. The damage came on the heels of a series of tornadoes that swept from Alabama to Virginia, causing $7.3 billion of insured damage. Jim Edens, Allstate's senior claim field director for its National Catastrophe Team, dispatched six mobile claims centers in a line from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Bristol, Va., to quickly handle those claims. The storm system "was so powerful that the path it left was just dirt. It sucked the leaves, the bark, the trees, the shrubs, the grass out of the ground. It left nothing but the earth," he remembered."

How quickly events can change our lives and why one has to always remember that we need to make the most out of each day.