Hurricane season ends Saturday. It was one of the deadliest in recent memory.

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: “Coastal events are not the only ones”
According to Andrea Schumacher, a project scientist at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research who studies weather risks and societal decisions, it had been decades since that many U.S. deaths were reported in a single season outside of 2005.

Despite significant advancements in warning and forecasting, Schumacher stated that “a bit of a messaging quandary” still exists. People “tend to think mostly about coastal areas when they think about hurricanes.”

The wide-ranging effects of Helene demonstrated once more the extent of a single storm.

Brennan stated that at one point, the hurricane center had hurricane and tropical storm watches and warnings in effect for western North Carolina and most of three entire states.

He stated, “Hurricanes are not limited to coastal events.” “The great majority of the fatalities during Helene occurred hundreds of miles away from the point of landfall, according to the maps showing the locations of those incidents.”

 

 

Only 15% of the 241 recorded deaths occurred in Florida, where Helene made ashore, compared to nearly 40% in North Carolina.

Hurricanes that made landfall in the United States mainland in 2024
The hurricane center, the National Weather Service, and state and municipal officials have all recorded deaths.
On July 8, Beryl made landfall in Matagorda County, Texas, resulting in over 40 fatalities.
Debby: After making landfall in Taylor County, Florida, on August 5, it caused nine fatalities in South Carolina and Florida.
Francine – It made landfall southwest of Morgan City, Louisiana, on September 11; no fatalities were reported.
Helene: Following the landfall in Taylor County, Florida on September 26, at least 241 people died in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Milton: Following landfall on October 9 close to Siesta Key, 44 people died around Florida.
A 17-year-old was killed by a rip current off Galveston, Texas, despite Alberto not making landfall in the United States, according to the hurricane center.

Many of the hurricane casualties were older than Davis. According to state officials in North Carolina, the average age of the Helene victims was 58. In Harris and Fort Bend counties in Texas, the average age of individuals who passed away after Beryl was 88.

Over 240 people lost their lives to Hurricane According to Brennan, Helene was the deadliest tropical hurricane in terms of fatalities caused by wind since at least 1963.

With gusts of up to 100 mph in North Carolina’s high mountains, he claimed that “it was just the scale of the event, and the size of the hurricane wind field.” The preliminary figures indicate that hurricane winds are responsible for at least 60 to 65 fatalities.

As Helene’s strong winds carried far inland after making landfall south of Tallahassee on the Florida coast on September 26, one-month-old twins, Khyzier and Khazmir Williams, perished along with their mother, Kobe Williams, when a tree toppled on their Georgia mobile home.

Through Georgia and into South Carolina, the storm’s strong winds destroyed rooftops, downed trees, and damaged power lines, leaving many counties without electricity, impacting 90% to 100% of utility customers. According to Brennan, falling trees were the cause of the majority, if not all, of the wind-related deaths.

Cataclysmic flooding occurred in the mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina due to a 200-mile stretch of the Appalachians that received anywhere between 10 and 30 inches of rain. Rescue crews searched lakes, creek beds, and mudslide debris for weeks in an attempt to find the missing. In Buncombe County, which is home to the county seat of Asheville, North Carolina, at least four victims were found in and near Echo Lake.