AT&T, Beset by Disaster Costs, Turns to 30-Year Climate Modeling
- Paid U.S. Department of Energy to predict floods, storms, wind
- Natural disasters cost the company $874 million since 2016
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By 2050, residents of southern Florida could become familiar with storms borne on 90-mph winds. Water levels during floods will rise by an average of 5 percent across the Southeast. And it will not be out of the ordinary for swaths of southeastern Georgia to be inundated under waters as much as 10 feet deep.
Those predictions, prepared by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, aren’t intended to protect residents. Rather, they were commissioned by AT&T Inc. to help the company tame its own rising natural disaster costs, by building its infrastructure with local climate change in mind.