John Yang: Massive storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton can devastate the people and properties that take direct hits, causing billions of dollars in damages, but the economic effects of these events can be felt thousands of miles away and for many months to come.

Megan Leonhardt is senior economics writer for Barron's.

Megan we talked to a tomato farmer who got took a whack from both Helene and Milton in Tennessee and Florida.

Let's listen to what he had to say.

Jon Esformes, Farmer: When Milton hit there was significant damage already done from Helene coming by to the coastal communities.

This just made it worse.

It will be a traumatic period of time, both for retail, but particularly for food service, the restaurant chains.

John Yang: So he's talking about the effect on the people who are buying his product.

What are the other ways that people, far from these storms will be feeling effects?

Megan Leonhardt, Senior Economic Writer, Barron's: He makes some great points there.

I mean, this is something where our food chain is national and international, and it's interesting, some of the initial estimates coming out of Florida alone for just Milton, it's going to be a $2.5 billion damage that the food and agricultural communities are going to sustain from this.

So this is something where we're going to see it affect food prices in the short term.

Keep in mind the citrus production in Florida makes up about 17 percent of the nation's citrus production.

And of course, it's going to be one of those things where it might not be a today problem, but it could also be a tomorrow problem.

Keep in mind that some of these agricultural products are things that go towards animal feed, which, of course, then goes into that kind of production and food chain, it's not only, you know, families who are getting tomatoes from their local grocery store, but as you know, the farmer did point out, this is going to affect the restaurant industry and food services industry, because they obviously need these items in bulk.

John Yang: And I presume that it's not just agriculture we're talking about.

It could also apply to manufacturing output.

Megan Leonhardt: Certainly.

I mean, you have to look at what was affected in Helene.

I mean, you know South Carolina in particular, and certainly, you know, Virginia, Tennessee, those are big manufacturing areas.

We're probably going to see that come out actually, in the economic data in the coming months, and not to mention the idea that, like places like Asheville, I mean, you had major highways that were damaged in North Carolina, those repairs are going to take some time.

In fact, actually, initial estimates are saying that we might not even see those repairs completely finished until 2025 and that actually could impact even things like tourism in Asheville and the surrounding areas.

The employment situation, 17 percent of the labor market is actually in tourism, and this was an area that was incredibly hard hit in Helene in particular.

This could make, you know, this very difficult for people, not only in the terms of the people living there, but those who want to go and enjoy the sort of Asheville scene that's developed in recent years.

John Yang: You talk about some of these showing up in the economic data that comes out.

Does any of this affect the numbers that policy makers watch?

Megan Leonhardt: Absolutely.

And it's what those situations where it's potentially not even coming out yet.

We did have some of the employment effects start to take place.

We saw that in some of the initial jobless claims data.

You know, those filing for unemployment have ticked up in recent weeks.

But then, of course, you know, we are going to see it, probably most pronounced in the upcoming October jobs report, which is going to be released November 1.

Now this is one of the final reports that we're going to get before the federal officials start really doing their analysis on whether or not to lower interest rates again for their November meeting and by how much.

Now, of course, this could also affect bigger national issues like gross domestic product.

In fact, some estimates are already sitting there and saying that we could see a short term hit to GDP as much as about four-tenths of a percentage point.

That doesn't sound like a ton, but keep in mind, this is the national GDP, and so it really does actually take quite a bit to make this kind of sway in the wind.

John Yang: Do recoveries actually give you a little up to rebound construction jobs, demand for lumber and other building supplies?

Megan Leonhardt: It's a great question.

And this is why I say it may be a short term, kind of, you know issue where we have this theory.

It's called the broken window theory.

And of course it means, you know, it's going to take a little bit of resources, people, jobs, to actually replace the broken window.

In this case, you know, many houses, and of course, a lot of the damage and wind damage.

But of course, this can be a little bit tricky to estimate.

And of course you do have this issue where in the U.S. in particular, we've really seen an uptick in the frequency of national disaster.

So in the 1980s for example, there we have about a 30, 33 events that were billion dollar disaster.

In the 90s, we had about 57 events.

In the last four years, from 2019 to 2023, we've had over $100 billion disasters.

That makes it very difficult to have these speedy recoveries and things that we can just continually bounce back from when we're dealing with so many events.

John Yang: The way emergency response works in this country is the federal government comes in, pours in money and resources after an event.

Should there be more attention on before an event, trying to protect and sort of make systems more resilient?

Megan Leonhardt: It's really interesting.

We are actually seeing insurers in particular, really come out ahead of this and say, Look, there's things that every day, ordinary Americans can do to actually help themselves in these kind of natural disaster events.

And they're not just talking about hurricanes in Florida.

They're also talking about, you know, California residents who may be exposed to wildfires.

They're talking about folks in the Midwest who may be dealing with tornadoes and heck, even places in like Austin, Texas that have had incredible storms, where we've seen golf ball sized hail, you know, coming down.

Those are all things where you -- no matter where you are in the country, you may have to worry about natural disasters and sort of flooding events and all these different issues.

And so we are sort of saying, Yes, we probably do need to be more proactive, both the you know, ordinary everyday Americans like us, as well as the big corporations that you know may actually have a lot of exposure to this kind of event.

John Yang: Megan Leonhardt of Barron's, thank you very much.

Megan Leonhardt: Thanks so much.