In 2021, there were 68 fatalities due to hurricanes reported in the United States. Since the beginning of the century, the highest number of fatalities was recorded in 2005, when four major hurricanes – including Hurricane Katrina – resulted in 1,518 deaths.

The worst hurricanes in U.S. history
Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in August 2005, ranked as the third deadliest hurricane in the U.S. since records began. Affecting mainly the city of New Orleans and its surroundings, the category 3 hurricane caused an estimated 1,500 fatalities. Katrina was also the costliest tropical cyclone to hit the U.S. in the past seven decades, with damages amounting to roughly 186 billion U.S. dollars. Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, both of which made landfall in 2017, ranked second and third, resulting in damage costs of 149 and 107 billion dollars, respectively.

How are hurricanes classified?
According to the Saffir-Simpson scale, hurricanes can be classified into five categories, depending on their maximum sustained wind speed. Most of the hurricanes that have made landfall in the U.S. since 1851 are category 1, the mildest of the five. Hurricanes rated category 3 or above are considered major hurricanes and can cause devastating damage. In 2021, there were 38 hurricanes recorded across the globe, of which 17 were major hurricanes.

In 2023, storms caused nearly 15,000 deaths across the globe. the third-largest figure recorded since 1990. In the past three decades, the highest annual deathtoll due to storms was registered in 1991, when storm events were responsible for the death of more than 146 thousand people worldwide. That year, a massive cyclone hit Bangladesh, becoming one of the deadliest storms of the century. The death count due to storms was also remarkably high in 2008, mainly associated with a cyclone which hit Myanmar in May.

The category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Galveston, Texas in 1900 was the deadliest to hit the United States, with a death toll estimated between 8,000 and 12,000. Since 1970, only one U.S. hurricane &#8211 namely Katrina, which hit in 2005 &#8211 made the ranking, with about 1,200 deaths.

Hurricane Katrina, which hit Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi in 2005, was the deadliest hurricane recorded in mainland United States since 1951. It had a death toll of nearly 1,400 fatalities. Meanwhile, hurricane Helene, which hit the Southeastern United States in September 2024, was the second deadliest to make landfall in the continental U.S. this century.

During the start of the current decade, the number of reported deaths due to tropical cyclones worldwide amounted to 2,670. The 10-year period with the highest recorded figures was between 2000 and 2009, where 167,300 deaths were reported due to tropical cyclones. Since 1970, almost 800 thousand deaths due to cyclones have been registered across the globe. Meanwhile, the number of tropical cyclones globally has increased continuously in the past half a century.

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, leaving widespread destruction in its path. The official death count for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria was 64 excess deaths, but that controversial death toll has been debated by a number of academic and independent researcher journalists. With the loss of electrical power and telecommunication systems for much of the island, it was unclear how many deaths in Puerto Rico were an immediate result of Hurricane Maria's destruction as opposed to the access to care conditions that prolonged. Santos-Burgoa et al. applied a time-series analysis of the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics data to estimate the death count over time. To consider how many people died as opposed to emigrated away from Puerto Rico, two counterfactual assumptions were used, a Census-based scenario and a Displacement-based scenario for expected population change. Under the Census scenario and the Displacement scenario, the estimated death counts in Puerto Rico was approximately 1200 deaths and 3000 deaths, respectively, where the Displacement scenario was acclaimed as the preferred model.

Due to copy-right issues, the article and supplementary materials should be accessed at the source website. Please use the following reference citation and doi to redirect there: Santos-Burgoa C, Sandberg J, Suárez E, Goldman-Hawes A, Zeger S, Garcia-Meza A, Pérez CM, Estrada-Merly N, Colón-Ramos U, Nazario CM, Andrade E. Differential and persistent risk of excess mortality from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico: a time-series analysis. The Lancet Planetary Health. 2018 Nov 1;2(11):e478-88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(18)30209-2

The statistic shows the leading causes of deaths due to tropical cyclones in the United States from 1963 to 2012. Total 8 percent of victims died because of wind effects during tropical cyclones.

In 2018, The George Washington University (GWU) Milken Institute School of Public Health, in collaboration with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a number of institutions in Puerto Rico, conducted a modeling effort to approximate the estimate excess mortality due to the devastation left by Hurricane Maria. As a follow-up to the controversial official death count of 64 deaths in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, this report summarizes the methods used and the interpretations thereof for the final estimate of approximately 3000 deaths.

Please refer to the George Washington University website for the original report or any inquiries thereof: https://publichealth.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/downloads/projects/PRstudy/Acertainment%20of%20the%20Estimated%20Excess%20Mortality%20from%20Hurricane%20Maria%20in%20Puerto%20Rico.pdf

By December 2017, the official death toll in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria was set at 64 excess deaths. To verify the validity of this death count, a study by Kishore et al used a community-based survey sampling method to compute an empirical measurement of the death count. The study sampled from approximately 3000 households, then compared the estimated deaths with the vital statistics data from 2016 through the end of December 2017. The study method estimated 4645 excess deaths with a 95% confidence interval from 793 to 8498 potential excess deaths. These estimated excess mortality shows a markedly high estimate with a wide confidence interval, but despite these issues the estimates do indicate that the official death tool is a significantly underestimate of the realistic excess deaths in the population.

Due to copy-right permissions, the article should be accessed at the source website. Please use the following reference citation and doi to redirect there: Kishore N, Marqués D, Mahmud A, Kiang MV, Rodriguez I, Fuller A, Ebner P, Sorensen C, Racy F, Lemery J, Maas L. Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. New England journal of medicine. 2018 Jul 12;379(2):162-70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1803972

Extreme heat was the deadliest weather condition in the United States in 2023, resulting in a total of 207 lives lost that year. This was followed by fire weather, having caused 103 fatalities. On the other side of the spectrum, only one life was lost due to ice in the North American country that year.

BACKGROUND: This descriptive finding examines excess deaths following Hurricane María, in Puerto Rico for September and October 2017. OBJECTIVE: We seek to determine the degree of excess deaths in Puerto Rico based on historical patterns of variability in deaths by month for the 2010-2016 period and using estimation techniques. METHODS: Data for this study come from death records from the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics system. We aggregated data by month and year (2010-2016) and produced means (expected deaths) and 95% confidence intervals (C.I., or patterns of variability) for each month. Using public statements from the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety, we estimate the number of deaths for September and October 2017 and compare it to the level of expected deaths considering the pattern of variability. RESULTS: Expected deaths for September and October were 2,383 (95% C.I. 2,296-2,469) and 2,428 (95% C.I. 2,380 - 2,476), respectively. Estimates for total deaths, for September and October 2017 were 2,987 (95% CI 2,900-3,074) and 3,043 (95% C.I. 2,995-3,091), respectively. The difference between our estimates and the upper 95% CI for the average deaths is 518 deaths for September and 567 deaths for October. CONCLUSIONS: The mortality burden may higher than official counts, and may exceed the current official death toll by a factor of 10 or more.

Bangladesh was hit by three out of the ten deadliest tropical cyclones recorded in the past half a century. The storm that hit the country in 1970 caused the largest number of deaths in the period, with approximately 300 thousand casualties. It was followed by storm Gorsky, which hit the country two decades later, and caused roughly 140 thousand deaths. India also recorded three of the top ten deadliest cyclones of the past decades, but with a much lower death toll than the ones seen in neighboring Bangladesh.

Wind disturbance profoundly shapes temperate forests but few studies have evaluated patterns and mechanisms of long-term forest dynamics following major windthrows. In 1990, we initiated a large hurricane simulation experiment in a 0.8 ha manipulation (pulldown) and 0.6 ha control area of a maturing Quercus rubra-Acer rubrum forest in New England. We toppled 276 trees in the pulldown, using a winch and cable, in the northwesterly direction of natural treefall from major hurricanes. Eighty percent of canopy trees and two-thirds of all trees greater than 5 cm dbh suffered direct and indirect damage. We used twenty years of measurements to evaluate the trajectory and mechanisms of forest response after intense disturbance. Based on the patch size and disturbance magnitude, we expected pioneer tree and understory species to drive succession. The first decade of analyses emphasized tree seedling establishment and sprouting by damaged trees as the dominant mechanisms of forest recovery in this extensive damaged area. However, despite 80% canopy damage and 8000 m2 patch size, surviving overstory and advance regeneration controlled longer-term forest development. Residual oaks make up 42% of stand basal area after 20 years. The new cohort of trees, dominated by black birch advance regeneration, contributes 30% of stand basal area. There were shifts in understory vegetation composition and cover, but few species were gained or lost after 20 years. Stand productivity rebounded quickly (litterfall recovered to pre-disturbance levels in six years), but we predict that basal area in the pulldown will lag behind the control (which gained 6 m2/ha over 20 years) for decades to come. This controlled experiment showed that although the scale and intensity of damage were great, abundant advance regeneration, understory vegetation, and damaged trees remained, allowing the forest to resist changes in ecosystem processes and invasion by new species.

Recurrent tropical cyclones frequently influence warm temperate forests in many coastal regions. If resistance to high winds (cyclone survival) and resilience in altered environments (post-cyclone recruitment) vary with cyclone intensity, then differences in composition, arboreal structure and dynamics of forests should occur in these forests. We hypothesized that major tropical cyclones should produce large, stratum-dependent effects that result in large environmental changes. We anticipate direct regeneration, with post-cyclone forests resembling pre-cyclone forests in composition, but potentially shifting to long-transient alternate states that do not readily or necessarily return to pre-cyclone states. Using a long-term, plot-based study, we explored direct effects of major Hurricane Katrina (sustained winds >50m/sec), as well as initial post-hurricane changes in overstory and understory trees in oak-dominated bottomland and cypress/tupelo-dominated swamp forests within the Missi...

Dataset of tweets about Hurricane Sandy which was the most destructive hurricane in United States history with more than 230 deaths and 75 billion of damages. This dataset were collected from 29th October 2012 to 31st October 2012 using the 3 keywords: “sandy”, “hurricane” and “storm”.In accordance with Twitter's Terms of Service, this file only provides identifiers of tweets in the dataset. In order to "hydrate" those tweet identifiers, or in other words, to collect the actual tweets, you suggest to use our Tweeset tool https://bitbucket.org/amjedbj/tweeset.

This statistic shows the ten natural disasters that resulted in the most fatalities in the United States from 1900 and 2016. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina (listed as storm) caused 1,833 fatalities in the United States.

Dataset: yawzi point and tektite

This spatial layer contains 451 geotagged photographs. All 563 photos taken of this event (including photos without locations) are available in the associated image collection, which may be downloaded as a zip folder.Hurricane Irma was a Category 5 hurricane that caused extensive damage across the Caribbean and in Florida, among other places. The hurrican formed August 30, 2017, and dissipated September 14, 2017. The hurricane caused at least 134 deaths and caused $77 billions USD in damage.

Dataset: pooled random sites (PRS)

The Global Cyclone Mortality Risks and Distribution is a 2.5 minute grid of global cyclone mortality risks. Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3) data provide a baseline estimation of population per grid cell from which to estimate potential mortality loss. Mortality loss estimates per hazard event are calculated using regional, hazard-specific mortality records of the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) that span the 20 years between 1981 and 2000. Data regarding the frequency and distribution of cyclone hazard are obtained from the Global Cyclone Hazard Frequency and Distribution data set. In order to more accurately reflect the confidence associated with the data and procedures, the potential mortality estimate range is classified into deciles, 10 classes of an approximately equal number of grid cells, providing a relative estimate of cyclone-based mortality risks. This data set is the result of collaboration among the Columbia University Center for Hazards and Risk Research (CHRR), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, and Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN).