In the news, it may seem like there are more reports of natural disasters than ever, and some people may wonder why. While climate change likely factors into this occurrence, we do not know all the causes of this. What we do know for sure is that natural disasters have major effects on communities.

In the last three years, there have been 66 natural disasters in the U.S., and they have killed around 3,690 people, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. It costs about $147.3 billion per year to repair the damages that are caused by natural disasters.

 Maralise Howes, a Boulder Creek, CA local, shared her experience to emphasize the impact of natural disasters on an individual and community level. She was forced to evacuate her home in August 2020 due to the San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit lightning fires. 

“There’s people here in the community who are still affected by it,” Howes said. “Half of the properties on my road were incinerated. Here we are four years later, 13 properties are gone and only two are [being] rebuilt.” 

Howes also talks about how she and the other community members feel when they smell wildfire smoke.

“Whenever anybody smells a little bit of wildfire smoke around here, we all talk to each other on the Facebook group and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a controlled burn,’” Howes said.

Here in California, there are two main natural disasters that happen: wildfires and earthquakes. While most FHS students do not have to deal with wildfires — except for some smoke — they may have to deal with earthquakes since the San Andreas fault runs under the area. 

Could climate change affect earthquakes like it does hurricanes and wildfires? The answer is unknown; scientists simply do not have enough information to be able to answer the question. Earthquakes happen more frequently than some might think. Tiny earthquakes with a magnitude of less than zero happen all the time. These quakes are so small that humans can not feel them. Some of these tiny earthquakes could be due to climate change, but scientists from NASA are unsure whether climate change could cause a larger, more devastating earthquake.

While earthquakes are a bigger concern for California, places like Florida have to deal with natural disasters in the form of hurricanes. Due to climate change, Florida experiences more intense storms due to rising temperatures that great warmer oceans and, in turn, warmer and wetter ocean breezes that feed tropical storms, according to United States Geological Survey.

Natural disasters have huge impacts on the communities they hit. This makes  climate change a more pressing issue that needs to be addressed. For now, the impacts of climate change on natural disasters are relatively minor, although it may cause catastrophes in the future.