Hurricane season ends Saturday. It was one of the deadliest in recent memory.
Christine B. Davis was born a few weeks before the 1914 hurricane season started and spent her entire life within 50 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, where a relentless stream of hurricanes and tropical storms strike the coasts of Texas and Louisiana where she lived for 110 years.
She survived countless storms, often remembering Category 4 Hurricane Carla in 1961. But the 2024 hurricane season – her 111th – proved too much.
The last of 13 siblings in her family, Davis died of environmental heat exposure after Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Matagorda County in June.
Davis was staying with a granddaughter in Cleveland, Texas, said another granddaughter, Emma Odom. They had a generator, but after a week with no electricity, “it was still a bit much for her body,” Odom said. “She just couldn’t take it.”
The great-great-great grandmother was one of at least 335 people who died in the five hurricanes that made landfall on the U.S. mainland this year, according to a USA TODAY analysis of preliminary estimates from state and local officials. The Atlantic hurricane season ends on Saturday, Nov. 30.
The deaths make 2024 the deadliest hurricane season since 2005, said National Hurricane Center director Michael Brennan.
Davis was among at least three dozen Texas residents who died during and after Beryl. With maximum sustained winds of 80 mph, Beryl knocked out power for thousands of Texans.
With a U.S. death toll of at least 241, Hurricane Helene is the continental United States’ deadliest single storm since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when about 1,400 people died.
Helene pushed the year to one of the deadlier seasons dating back to the beginning of hurricane tracking by satellites in the 1950s. Brennan said it’s also among the deadliest for freshwater flooding and winds.
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.
Other hurricane-related deaths
At least 10 deaths were attributed to tornadoes, including at least six reported associated with Hurricane Milton. Brennan said it's the most tornado deaths in one hurricane season behind 2004.
In addition to Davis' death, Harris County, Texas officials attributed at least six other deaths to environmental heat exposure amidst the power outages.
After Helene's Florida landfall, at least 11 victims were found in homes flooded by storm surge in Pinellas County when the Gulf of Mexico rose up to 7 feet higher, according to the sheriff's office. Their average age was over 70.
However, no deaths were reported in Taylor County, where Debby and Helene made landfall, Brennan said. The surge in sea level that struck the coast with Helene in parts of Taylor County may have topped 20 feet, according to preliminary estimates.
Decades of effort and investment among state, federal and local governments to map and understand the risks and devise evacuation plans and issue storm surge specific watches and warnings have “really made a difference” in reducing storm surge deaths, Brennan said.
Meteorologists, emergency managers, social scientists and other researchers continue looking at ways to reduce the overall number of storm-related deaths, including the challenges surrounding when, where and how people are asked to evacuate, Schumacher said.
Solving the complexities in why people choose to evacuate or not is still a challenge, she said. "There's definitely a lot of research being done."
People don't make decisions just based on weather forecasts and warnings, she said. "There's there's a plethora of other things they're thinking about."
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change and the environment for USA TODAY. She's written about hurricanes, tornadoes and violent weather for more than 30 years. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2024 Atlantic hurricane season one of the deadliest in recent memory