Severe Summer Weather Business Threats

Blog
May 13, 2022

The summer season doesn’t always promise nonchalant days filled with sunny afternoons and fun outdoor festivities. It’s easy to forget about triple-digit temperatures, whipping thunderstorms, wildfires, and other severe summer threats. During the summer months, Mother Nature can surprise your critical business systems by unleashing myriad summer weather business threats between the end of the school year and Labor Day. 

As the hurricane season is already underway, along with some wildfires happening across the country, there’s hope for us to catch a breath. 

Let’s take a look at summer’s greatest perils. 

Hurricanes 

Recent hurricane seasons have been above average, creating widespread damage and loss of life.

This image below shows the average track density for tropical systems in the Atlantic between 1988 and 2018. 

Hurricane season

This tropical track density map was developed by evaluation of analog years, which are previous years that have weather patterns similar to current and projected weather patterns. Analog years are typically used to predict possible impacts during a hurricane season. 

Scientists also contend that climate change is expected to lead to stronger, wetter hurricanes overall. It has also made them more destructive. Because global sea levels have risen, hurricanes create storm surges that go further inland, flooding homes and businesses.

Thunderstorms 

A thunderstorm is a rain shower accompanied by thunder and lightning. A thunderstorm is assigned a severe category when it contains hail one inch or bigger, winds excessing 57.5 mph, or a tornado.  

Thunderstorms

There are about 100,000 thunderstorms each year in the U.S. alone, with roughly 2,000 of them in progress. About 10% of these reach severe levels. 

Statistics

Average number of days annually with thunderstorms

Many threats are associated with thunderstorms. Under certain conditions, rainfall from thunderstorms causes flash flooding, killing more people each year than hurricanes, tornadoes, or lightning. Lightning causes fires around the world each year, resulting in fatalities. Hail up to the size of softballs damages buildings. Wind gusts up to more than 120 mph knock down trees, power lines, and mobile homes. And tornadoes can destroy anything on their path. We've developed a comprehensive checklist for tornado preparedness to help your organization get prepared. Download it and distribute across your teams.

Flooding

While the risk of flood damage varies from property to property, unexpected floods can happen anytime, anywhere. Summertime’s plethora of wild weather — including hurricanes, thunderstorms, and monsoons — makes the season susceptible to floods. 

Flooding is a temporary overflow of water onto land that is typically dry. Failing to evacuate flooded areas, entering flood waters, or remaining after a flood has passed can be deadly. Floods may: 

  • Be a result of rain, snow, coastal storms, storm surges, and overflows of dams. 
  • Develop slowly or quickly, with flash floods occurring with no warning. 
  • Cause outages, obstruct transportation, damage buildings, and create landslides. 

Most companies can save between 20% and 90% on the cost of stock and portable equipment by taking action to prepare in advance of flooding. Our checklist will help mitigate your organization’s risk and protect your assets, revenue, and, most importantly, your people. 

Flood Preparedness Checklist

Mitigate your organization’s risk and protect your assets, revenue, and, most importantly, your people

Monsoons

Monsoons

Monsoons occur during the Summer and can be defined as a regional atmospheric circulation pattern that brings humidity to areas that otherwise are typically dry.

The large-scale shifts in wind direction bring massive, daily thunderstorms to regions that stay dry seven or eight months a year. North America’s monsoon season officially kicks off by the end of June, beginning in New Mexico and Arizona, affecting western Texas, southern Utah, Colorado, and southern Nevada.

Wildfires

A wildfire season typically aligns with times when there’s an excess of dry fuels, winds and temperatures are above average, and humidity is low, which creates hot, dry conditions. However, experts believe the new pattern for wildfires is emergingerasing the typical wildfire season timeline. 

As wildfires become costlier each year, they happen more frequently. Overall, there were 8,619 wildfires in 2021, consuming almost 2.6 million acres. Based on scientific data, most of them are caused by humans. 

Extreme Heat

Even a single power outage event can have a significant and lasting effect on revenue, productivity, capacity, and labor. On average, 70% of Agility customers’ business interruptions involve a power outage. As a result, a company can no longer provide services to its customer, leading to extensive losses. Annually, businesses lose more than $27 billion due to power outages.

Power outages are widespread during hot summer days, taking down different appliances and triggering a domino effect that occurs on the heat-sensitive power grid. Air-conditioners turned up to the max contribute significantly to the cause, overloading transmission lines which have limited capacity. Additionally, their ability to transport power decreases even more when during the summer season. The problem is intensified because the lines naturally heat up when carrying a lot of power.

When one line shuts down, others have to pick up the load, leading them to go through the same cycle. As the lines struggle to carry additional power, they can no longer keep voltages at their intended level. These declining voltage levels can subsequently cause lights to dim and equipment to operate at speeds that cause excessive wear and tear on components.

The All-Hazards Approach to Identifying Risk

Tips to categorize, score and size risks including resources impacted, gaps identified, and controls that need to be in place.