The weather can damage things - metal rusts, water and ice expand and crack pavements, walls and bricks. Paint blisters in the sun and fades. Wind can blow things down. Extreme weather can blow whole houses over and damage roofs.

We can protect things from the weather by treating them with special paint or by covering them with a protective layer of something more weather resistant. Cars, for example, have different paint treatments for extremely cold or hot climates, where normal car paint would be quickly damaged.

Buildings may be built in a special way to make them 'hurricane proof' with strengthened structures and special shatterproof glass. In places where there is regular flooding and torrential rain, buildings have specially shaped roofs and gutters to encourage run off. Sometimes roofs made of natural materials simply have to be replaced at the start of each dry season.

Councils have to budget large sums of money each year to repair the damage caused by weather to roads, local infrastructure and public buildings. Often they have a contingency budget for disasters such as flooding or extremely bad storms. The insurance claims for the great storm of 1987 in the UK amounted to some £1.5 billion.