An Alarming New Trend in Hurricane Deaths
A week after Hurricane Helene ripped through the American Southeast, it has careened into a terrible category of natural disasters: By some measures, it is now the third-deadliest storm to make landfall in the United States, after Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Katrina. More than 200 people have now been reported dead. Over half of the fatalities so far occurred in North Carolina’s mountainous western region, where entire towns were crushed beneath the weight of relentless rains and crumbling earth. And the death toll is expected to keep rising.
Hurricanes can be extraordinarily lethal. Winds can send trees lurching into living rooms and debris hurtling through the air. Fallen power lines can cause electrocutions. Historically, storm surge—the treacherous rise of seawater as hurricane winds push waves toward shore—has been the deadliest hurricane hazard. But Helene, which did most of its killing far from the reach of the sea, is an emblem of a new trend in fatalities. From 2013 to 2022, drowning from rainfall flooding, not storm surge, was the top cause of tropical-cyclone deaths, according to data from the National Hurricane Center—and the shift is already having profound effects. For individuals, this means reassessing established wisdom about hurricane safety. And American emergency-preparedness organizations, which have spent decades working to minimize fatalities from storm surge, haven’t fully adapted to combat the new leading killer.
As with any other major storm, Helene’s lethal nature was a product of numerous variables, assembled in just the wrong way. In North Carolina, there was simply too much rain all at once. A hot summer had saturated the air with moisture. Helene conjured rains in the area days before the massive cyclone arrived in the state, and merged with other storm systems, which resulted in even more rain. The mountains gave the storm winds an extra lift, sending moisture high up into the air, where it condensed and delivered still more precipitation. Remnant showers added to the total rainfall as the storm spun away.
