After the storm: $10 million and counting

By Times staff | Thursday, July 24, 2008

Already, power has been restored to most of the 140,000 left without electricity Monday. It’s an amazing accomplishment given the breadth of damage. There is no way to fully calculate the cost of this damage, but here’s one conservative estimate. Presume power outages force 50,000 households to toss and replenish the contents of their refrigerators. At a minimum of $100 per household, that’s a $5 million community-wide expense.

Add in property damage, hotel expenses, ice, tree trimming of perhaps $100 on average for each household and that’s another $5 million, creating a total of $10 million in personal, unbudgeted expenses, only some of which are covered by insurance. We expect the total will be much, much higher.

And that doesn’t account for the public works costs still being calculated.

The floods, tornadoes and storms we’ve already faced didn’t knock out power to huge sections of entire cities. Even the ice storms that snapped countless wires still left poles standing.

This wind took down poles, wires and all.

This storm will require visiting utility crews to undertake a rebuilding effort we’ve not seen in our community.

Welcome them warmly. They’re going to be here for a while.