This report explores the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) storm database, which tracks characteristics of major storms and weather events in the United States from 1950 to November 2011. The analysis addresses two key questions: (1) which types of weather events are most harmful to population health, and (2) which types of events have the greatest economic consequences. After loading the raw data from the bzip2-compressed CSV file, we cleaned and processed the event type labels, decoded the property and crop damage exponents, and aggregated totals by event type. Tornadoes were found to be overwhelmingly the most harmful event type with respect to fatalities and injuries. For economic consequences, floods caused the most total economic damage, followed by hurricanes/typhoons and storm surges. These findings provide actionable insight for government and municipal managers seeking to prioritize emergency preparedness resources.