In all five cases, those strikes were on much smaller islands (Guam, Hong Kong and the Northern Marianas) making it easier to achieve high-intensity scores per area of land affected. More notably, all five were in the Pacific Ocean, whose wide, warm expanse gives cyclones a long runway to intensify. In more than 60 years of data, no Atlantic hurricane was a disaster as epic as Maria slamming into Puerto Rico.

What will this cost Puerto Rico’s economy? History is a useful guide. A study one of us did with Daiju Narita of Hokkaido University showed that assets in the United States are far more likely to be destroyed in a cyclone than assets in a comparable event in other wealthy nations, like Japan, Hong Kong or Australia. This is, in part, because of the fragility of our infrastructure, which looks more like that of poorer countries, like India or China. This was certainly the case with the Puerto Rican power system, run by a utility which filed for bankruptcy this summer. The island’s electric grid was all but destroyed by the storm. We were not prepared, and that is going to cost us.

But sadly, the largest costs are yet to come. Research with Professor Jina shows hurricanes can have a strong effect on economic growth over the following decades. Historically, a 1-in-10 cyclone event slows per capita income growth in the affected country to the point that it is 7 percent poorer two decades after the storm. This is on par with losses from an average financial or banking crisis.

Maria’s impact may be much worse. To determine how much worse, we used an econometric model of the costs of cyclones over the past 60 years and applied it to the characteristics of Hurricane Maria and the pre-storm economic conditions in Puerto Rico. We calculated that Maria could lower Puerto Rican incomes by 21 percent over the next 15 years — a cumulative $180 billion in lost economic output. Supposing that Puerto Rico had been on track to sustain its 0.8 percent real per capita annual growth between 2009 and 2015, then we would expect to see Maria undo all those gains and then some. It could now take 26 years for the next generation to get back to where we are today, assuming that per capita growth rate would have continued.