Beryl hit land as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday off the coast of Texas. Since then, it has pummeled the Lone Star State, cutting power to millions of people and causing damage.
An official report from the Associated Press said that Beryl, which became a tropical depression on Monday, killed several people in Texas and at least one person in Louisiana.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Beryl became a Category 5 storm unusually early in the year, in part because the water temperatures were so high. It was the first hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. The government said this was a “explosive start” to the hurricane season. NOAA recently said that there was an 85% chance that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season would be above normal. Ocean temperatures were one reason for this.
NOAA said in May that there would be between 17 and 25 named storms, which are storms with winds of 39 mph or higher. There are chances that eight to thirteen of them will turn into hurricanes with winds of 74 mph or higher. Only four to seven of those storms are expected to grow into major hurricanes with winds of 111 mph or more (Category 3, 4, or 5).
In this setting, disaster recovery is getting a lot of attention. Home improvement stores like Home Depot Inc. HD, -0.74% and Lowe’s Cos. Inc. LOW, -0.38% are very helpful in rebuilding after a hurricane. CEO Brandon Sink said on Lowe’s fourth-quarter conference call in February that the company “cycled two straight years of hurricane recovery,” with Hurricane Ida in 2021 and Hurricane Ian in 2022.
Michael Baker, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, says that Home Depot’s sales went up by $377 million in 2018 because of the work that was done to clean up and rebuild after Hurricane Isaac.
Expert in exchange-traded funds One of the things that ProcureAM offers is help with recovering from disasters. Companies that help with natural disaster recovery and prevention are in the Procure Disaster Recovery Strategy ETF FIXT.
Andrew Chanin, CEO of ProcureAM, told MarketWatch that the idea for the ETF came from his time in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He said, “I was a junior at Tulane when Katrina hit.” “My landlord bought plywood from Home Depot to board up the windows right away.”
The Procure Disaster Recovery Strategy ETF began trading on June 1, 2022, which was the first day of the Atlantic hurricane season that year. Chanin says that the ETF’s companies work in areas that are “before, during, and after” natural disasters.
While Home Depot and Lowe’s are in the ETF, it also includes a lot of other companies, such as Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp. (GLDD, -0.12%), Xylem Inc. (XYL, -0.35%), and Fluor Corp. (FLR, -1.20%), which does cleanup work. It’s Sulzer AG SUN, -2.20 The Procure Disaster Recovery Strategy ETF’s biggest holding right now is SULZF, +5.98%, a company that focuses on technologies for pumping, agitation, mixing, separation, and purification.
“This isn’t an ESG fund; it’s something else. We’re not looking at ESG scores or anything like that,” Chanin said, adding that the fund’s companies that help people recover from disasters “need to be championed.”
Natural disasters have huge financial effects, which shows how much work needs to be done in the coming years to prepare, recover, and rebuild. If you look at hurricanes, NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management says that each one costs an average of $22.8 billion.
The Office of Management and Budget predicted in 2023 that disasters caused by climate change could cause the federal government to spend more than $100 billion each year and bring in up to $2 trillion less each year by the end of the century.
