Though Harvey and Irma did less catastrophic damage on the mainland, that damage was more costly because of the value of the homes, businesses, and public infrastructure there. “We’re going to have to rebuild everything,” Bonnie Stephenson, the mayor of the tiny town of Rose City, Texas, told me when I visited, with mold growing up the sides of homes and heaps of mucked-out garbage lining the streets, six weeks out. The whole town would have to be gutted, reframed, and rebuilt, like much of southwest Texas and western Florida. The government estimates the damages from the storms and floods at $131 billion.

Then, there were the wildfires that lit up a number of dry western states this year, and some of them continue to rage today. Fires in California alone have caused at least $9.4 billion in damages. “These numbers not only represent staggering losses to tens of thousands of Californians,” Dave Jones, the state’s insurance commissioner, said in a statement. “The October wildfires that devastated whole communities and tragically cost 44 people their lives have now proven to be the most destructive and deadliest in our state’s history.” That number is likely to prove a fractional estimate, not taking into account the damages from the uncontained fires still alight in southern California and not accounting for uninsured losses.

All told, there were at least 15 weather events costing at least a billion dollars each in 2017, the second-most since 1980, the government estimates. To be fair, weather gets costlier over time because the value of America’s homes and businesses and the economy itself gets bigger over time, as noted by Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Still, tallying up the damages, the winds, floods, and fires are likely to end up wiping away 0.2 or 0.3 percent of the nation’s wealth—causing as much of a hit in percentage terms, in other words, as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 or the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. This year really was different.

Another, related way of looking at the toll is in terms of the costs to the government to fight fires, move families, save stranded individuals, and rebuild. There are the significant direct costs for disaster relief, for one. Congress has provided more than $50 billion in emergency spending related to storms and floods, including emergency nutrition assistance for Puerto Rico, debt relief for the federal flood-insurance program, and new funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The forest service has also spent $3 billion on firefighting, and state and local governments have committed similar sums.

But that does not fully capture the way that storms, fires, and droughts act as a drain on public resources. There is also the cost of cuts to other agencies to free up money for disasters, and the burden of increased spending on social insurance and safety-net programs, such as food stamps. Consider this analysis of the California fires—just one catastrophic event among many this year: “The cost to contain and fight the fire and deal with the aftermath will be in the billions,” wrote Joel N. Myers, the chairman of the forecasting firm AccuWeather. “The loss in tax revenue from businesses no longer around, including the vineyards; the workers who have lost their jobs and can no longer pay taxes as well as other impacts will be quite costly. This will create a hole in the California budget, which may necessitate an increase in taxes. If California has to borrow more this might negatively impact its bond ratings and it will have to pay higher interest rates on all borrowings.” He estimates the impact at $70 billion to $100 billion.