On August 23, 2005, a tropical depression formed over the Bahamas, and became Tropical Storm Katrina on August 24, 2005. Hurricane Katrina caused approximately $161 billion in damage, and is the costliest hurricane on record. Millions of people were left homeless along the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans. An estimated 1,833 people died in the hurricane and the flooding that followed. Rip current and surf deaths went from 6% of the hurricane deaths to 15%.Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the United States. Since 2013, only 11% of the hurricane deaths were storm-surge related, the hurricane center said.īut freshwater flooding deaths went from 27% of the deaths to 57% of all hurricane deaths, a figure that may be skewed by 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, when there 65 freshwater flooding deaths. NOAA has made a concerted effort to improve storm surge forecasts, warning and education of residents on the coast. It found that a much lower percentage of people are being killed by storm surge, but a higher percentage of Americans are dying in freshwater flooding.įrom 1963 to 2012, storm surge was responsible for almost half of the hurricane deaths. In a separate report for the American Meteorological Society, the National Hurricane Center analyzed how people died in direct hurricane deaths the last 10 years and compared them to earlier. The center doesn’t have access to the longer-term statistical studies used to calculate “indirect” deaths, but tries to bring them in when able, such as in the case of 2005’s Katrina and 2017’s Maria. The National Hurricane Center’s Brennan said his agency writes official reports on storms that use fatality statistics based on information from government officials, medical examiners and the media within several months of landfall. And the largest gap was for 2017’s Irma, where NOAA said 92 people died directly or indirectly in the United States, while Parks counted 1,202. Parks’ team found bigger gaps between official death counts and what they calculated for 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, where the hurricane center said 147 people died. Researchers attributed the excess deaths to the storm, using a standard public health technique.Īfter a storm, people need to have money “to do more than just survive from day to day,” which is why the poorer, more vulnerable survive less, said former NOAA hurricane scientist Jim Kossin of the climate risk nonprofit First Street Foundation, who also was not part of the study.įinding out how many people are really killed because of a storm is much more challenging to quantify than merely counting direct deaths reported in the media, Kossin said.įor example, the National Hurricane Center estimates that 1,200 people died in 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, but using deaths before, during and after and comparing them to 30 years of normal death rates for those places at that time of year, Parks and colleagues figured a death count of 1,491. Instead of just looking at people who drowned, were hit by debris or killed directly by the storm, the study in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances examines changes in a storm-hit county’s overall number of deaths just before, during and after a hurricane and compared those to normal years. That’s 13 times more than the 1,385 people directly killed by storms that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration figures, but the study authors said those numbers aren’t directly comparable. the last few decades killed thousands more people than meteorologists traditionally calculate and a disproportionate number of those victims are poor, vulnerable and minorities, according to a new epidemiological study.Ī team of public health and storm experts calculated that from 1988 to 2019 more than 18,000 people likely died, mostly indirectly, because of hurricanes and lesser tropical cyclones in the continental United States.
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