As the incredible 2005 hurricane season winds down, I’ve been doing some research on hurricane deaths in the United States, trying to put the devastation that our country has suffered this year in some kind of historical perspective. (Actually I started this research some time ago, and just finished it tonight.)
I used this list of “All Hurricanes which Affected the Continental United States” as my starting point. I then looked at the individual NOAA Tropical Cyclone Reports for each of the listed storms. Occasionally, I supplemented those reports with numbers culled from this list, this article and/or relevant Wikipedia articles. Wherever there was more than one reported death toll, I used the higher number.
My result? In the 50 years preceding the 2005 hurricane season, from 1955 through 2004, 1,788 people died as a result of hurricanes that affected the continental United States.
In the 2005 hurricane season alone, 1,492 people died in the continental U.S. from Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Ophelia, Rita and Wilma. That’s 83% as many in the preceding half-century!!
Wow.
And the only reason the preceding half-century even exceeds this year’s toll at all is because of Hurricane Diane in 1955, which killed 184 people, and Hurricane Audrey in 1957, which killed 390. If you “count backwards” from Hurricane Katrina — this year’s most devastating U.S. hurricane by far — to see how far back in time you can get before the combined U.S. death tolls of all prior hurricanes exceeds Katrina’s toll, you can make it all the way back to 1957 and Katrina still has the edge. During the nearly 48-year span between Carrie in 1957 and Irene in 2005, Atlantic hurricanes killed a grand total of 1,202 people in the contintental United States. Then along came Katrina, which killed 1,332 and counting.
(Note: This analysis does not include mere tropical storms, because they’re not included on the NOAA list. We’re talking purely about “All Hurricanes which Affected the Continental United States,” as defined by NOAA.)
I’m far too lazy to format my raw research into something more readable, but if you want to take a look at my typed-out notes (and double-check my math, if you wish), click here.
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Categories: T.S. Delta, Epsilon & Zeta
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November 30th, 2005 at 10:37:47 pm
what about in the PREVIOUS 50 years to the 50 years in your study?
December 1st, 2005 at 1:22:16 am
dramtic!
i hope CNN picks this up-and i will try emailing the organization.
December 1st, 2005 at 1:28:09 am
Bert, no way am I looking up another 50 years’ worth of storms. :) Originally I was only planning to go back as far as Camille, but then I realized that wasn’t far enough to find the point where, counting backwards from Katrina, the prior storms’ combined tolls eclipse Katrina’s… so I went back to 1955… but it took forever! Navigating through grainy scanned JPEG images of typewritten NHC hurricane reports on NOAA FTP sites is not exactly fun. :)
However, clearly, if you went back another 50 years, there would be vastly more deaths. Indeed, the 1928 Lake Okeechobee hurricane alone exceeds Katrina’s toll. Most of the U.S. hurricanes with 250+ death tolls were between 1905 and 1954. (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdead.html.) No surprise there — the forecasting technology was so primitive, evacuations and such weren’t really possible. What’s amazing (and awful) about Katrina is how it utterly eclipsed everything in the modern era that came before it. (And of course, it could have been so much worse — if the center moves 40 miles to the west, Katrina makes the 1900 Galveston hurricane look like a walk in the park.)
December 2nd, 2005 at 7:13:03 am
hi brendan
CNN has received your analysis. i also sent it to amy goodman at ‘democracy now’.
seems to me this is definitely newsworthy.
thanks for your dd