On Tuesday morning, disaster analyst Chuck Watson pegged $42 billion as a reasonable estimate for the cost of destruction Tropical Storm Harvey would leave in its wake. By dawn Wednesday, he had raised that to as much as $75 billion.
Harvey’s initial blast along the Texas coast as a Category 4 hurricane was bad enough, sending gasoline prices surging and crude futures plunging as refineries shut. Now the storm has returned, making landfall a second time in Louisiana, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
