How Much Will the Wildfires Cost?

Good morning.

The fires across the West have continued to burn, continued to kill people, and continued to incinerate homes and fill our air with smoke. Firefighters have continued to do the arduous, time-consuming work of containing explosive flames before they reach the places we most want to protect.

It’s an all-consuming cycle — one in which it would be understandable to forget that, once the fires have been extinguished, it’s all going to cost residents, businesses and governments a lot of money.

Tom Corringham, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has not forgotten.

“We’re setting records year after year,” he told me on Tuesday. “It’s a little early to say what the total impacts are going to be, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the damages are over $20 billion this year.”

And that, he added, is counting only the “direct costs.”

Mr. Corringham studies the economic impacts of extreme weather, which, as you might expect, are at once growing and difficult to count.