With the exception of 9/11 terrorist attacks, the top ten most costly catastrophes in U.S. history have all been natural disasters—five of them hurricanes—and all of them have occurred since 1988...

With the exception of 9/11 terrorist attacks, the top ten most costly catastrophes in U.S. history have all been natural disasters—five of them hurricanes—and all of them have occurred since 1988 (Steinberg, 2000). According to environmental historian Ted Steinberg, this has far more to do with the political capacity of cities and states to prepare for and respond to natural disasters than some mysterious increase in the severity of the events. They may be disasters, but politics makes them calamities.