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Born just a few weeks before the hurricane season of 1914 began, Christine B. Davis lived her whole life within 50 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, where a constant barrage of hurricanes and tropical storms batter the shores of Louisiana and Texas, where she spent 110 years.
She frequently recalls Hurricane Carla in 1961, a Category 4 storm that she survived innumerable times. However, the 111th hurricane season in 2024 proved to be too much.
When Hurricane Beryl hit Matagorda County in June, Davis, the last of 13 siblings in her family, perished from exposure to the heat.
According to another granddaughter, Emma Odom, Davis was lodging with a grandchild in Cleveland, Texas. Despite having a generator, Odom stated that a week without power was “still a bit much for her body.” “She simply couldn’t handle it.”
According to a USA TODAY analysis of initial estimates from state and municipal agencies, the great-great-great grandmother was among the at least 335 fatalities from the five hurricanes that hit the U.S. mainland this year. On Saturday, November 30, the Atlantic hurricane season comes to a close.
According to Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center, the deaths make 2024 the worst hurricane season since 2005.
At least three dozen people from Texas lost their lives during and after Hurricane Beryl, including Davis. For thousands of Texans, Beryl knocked out electricity with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph.
Hurricane Helene has killed at least 241 people in the United States, making it the worst hurricane to hit the continental United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which claimed over 1,400 lives.
Helene forced the year into one of the deadliest seasons since satellites first began tracking hurricanes in the 1950s. According to Brennan, it’s also one of the deadliest for winds and freshwater flooding.
Hurricanes: ‘Not just coastal events’ Outside of 2005, it had been decades since so many U.S. deaths were reported in a single season, said Andrea Schumacher, a project scientist studying weather risks and decisions in society at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research. Although vast improvements have been made in forecasting and warning, “a bit of a messaging quandary” remains, Schumacher said. When people think about hurricanes, “they tend to think mostly about coastal areas.” Helene’s vast and varied impacts showed again how far-reaching a single storm can be. At one point, the hurricane center had most of three entire states and western North Carolina under tropical storm and hurricane watches and warnings, Brennan said. “Hurricanes are not just coastal events,” he said. “If you look at the maps of where the fatalities happened during Helene, the vast majority happened hundreds of miles away from where landfall occurred.”
Nearly 40% of the 241 deaths were reported in North Carolina and only 15% in Florida, where Helene made landfall. Deaths from landfalling hurricanes in the mainland US in 2024 Deaths have been reported by state and local officials, the National Weather Service and the hurricane center. Beryl – More than 40 deaths after landfall in Matagorda County, Texas on July 8. Debby – 9 deaths in Florida and South Carolina, after its Aug. 5 landfall in Taylor County, Florida Francine – No deaths were reported after its Sept. 11 landfall southwest of Morgan City, Louisiana. Helene – At least 241 deaths in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia after the Sept. 26 landfall in Taylor County, Florida. Milton – 44 deaths across Florida after landfall near Siesta Key on Oct. 9. Although Alberto did not make landfall in the U.S., a 17-year-old died after being caught in a rip current off Galveston, Texas, the hurricane center said. Like Davis, many of the hurricane victims were older. The average age of the Helene victims reported by North Carolina state officials was 58. The average age of those who died after Beryl in Harris and Fort Bend counties in Texas was 88.
More than 240 dead from Hurricane Helene Helene was the deadliest tropical cyclone from wind-related deaths since at least 1963, Brennan said. “It was just the scale of the event, and the size of the hurricane wind field,” with winds gusts up to 100 mph in the high mountains of North Carolina, he said. At least 60-65 deaths are attributed to hurricane winds according to the preliminary numbers. Among those victims are 1-month-old twins, Khyzier and Khazmir Williams, who died with their mother, Kobe Williams, when a tree fell on their Georgia mobile home as Helene’s high winds pushed far inland after making landfall south of Tallahassee on the Florida coast on Sept. 26. The storm’s powerful winds felled trees and power lines and ravaged rooftops through Georgia and into South Carolina, leaving many counties with power outages affecting between 90% to 100% of utility customers. Brennan said most if not all of the wind fatalities were the result of falling trees. A swath of anywhere from 10 to 30 inches of rain along about 200 miles of the Appalachians brought cataclysmic flooding to the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. For weeks, rescue teams scoured creek beds, lakes and mudslide debris searching for the lost. At least four victims were recovered in and around Echo Lake, in Buncombe County, where Asheville, North Carolina, is the county seat.
How climate change fuels danger from hurricanes
Before the season started, Brennan said he was increasingly concerned about reminding people that water hazards are the deadliest aspects of a hurricane, even far inland and away from the strongest winds. Over the past decade, the percentage of hurricane victims who die as a result of freshwater flooding had climbed to nearly 60%.
The mind-boggling rain before and during Helene underscored his point. More than 34 people drowned in the North Carolina flooding, while 23 were killed in landslides, according to North Carolina state officials.
The deaths attributed to freshwater flooding and rainfall during Helene are the most since Hurricane Agnes in 1972, Brennan said.
At least three separate groups of researchers, including a trio of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have attributed some portion of Helene’s extreme rainfall to increased warming from climate change. Scientists have repeatedly stated that ocean heating, particularly the Gulf of Mexico, adds energy to hurricanes, and heating in the atmosphere allows storms to hold more water.
Heat content in the Gulf of Mexico reached record highs this year.
“We’ve been talking about that for years and years, and how it’s going to get worse with climate change,” Schumacher said. The Appalachian Mountains demonstrated the “terrible mix” that the mix of terrain and torrential rainfalls can be, she said. The risks of landslides and flooding in several counties in the Appalachians are very high because they are in such a geographically vulnerable situation, Schumacher said. “I think that’s why we saw so many fatalities with Helene inland,” she said. “Once the rain is coming, once the mountainside is sliding, there’s no protective action that you can do sort of last minute to really make a big difference.” Brennan said federal officials are rolling out new flood inundation maps to highlight areas at risk from rainfall flooding. The maps were used in eastern Tennessee to get people out of harm’s way, he said.
