SOMETHING UNEXPECTED
- Mar 22
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 14
I was just checking in on the flooding in Hawai'i when I thought to look up how bad the last hurricane season was in the US. To my surprise, there were zero landfalls in the United States or its territories in 2025. Doesn't that seem weird? Well, what's actually strange is if you, like myself, thought that was unusual. Based on my total ignorance and misperceptions, I assumed this was a radical departure from the norm. Nope. Happens all the time.
About one year in four sees no hurricanes reach the continental US (at least for the period we have records, which go back to 1851). And since Y2K, there have been eight years with no direct landfalls, including 2000, 2001, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2015, and 2025. The annual average for this period is roughly 1.6 to 1.9 hurricanes; but, just as you would expect from so many years without, to hit this average some years saw a bunch. 2020 tied the record for landfalls in a year with six hurricanes while 2005 saw a record number of 15 total brewed out in the Atlantic but just five of those made landfall, which is still a lot. You might remember hurricanes Katrina and Rita that year, which were the most devastating (though both were only rated at category 3 of 5 by landfall).
From there, if you go seeking data on hurricane activity from the prior century, from 1900 to 2000, you will find a spread across the decades and the most active decade being in the 1990s, with 31 hurricanes affecting the US. This doesn't look to me like a serious spike in more recent decades or a significant increase since records began.
Of course, that's just the number of storms, not the largest, most destructive, or those causing the most fatalities. Most of the deadliest hurricanes on record arrived in the last half of the 1800s and first half of the 1900s. That's especially surprising given that the population of the US has continued to jump up over this period from just 23 million in 1850, to 151 million in 1950, and almost 350 million today. Here are the years and recorded number of casualties of the twenty worst such storms ever recorded:
Great Galveston Hurricane 1900 8,000
Lake Okeechobee 1928 2,500
Katrina 2005 1,200
Cheniere Caminanda 1893 1,100-1,400
Sea Islands 1893 1,000-2,000
Georgia/South Carolina 1881 700
Audrey 1957 415
Great Labor Day Hurricane 1935 410
Last Island 1856 400
Miami Hurricane 1926 370
Grand Isle 1909 350
Florida Keys/South Texas 1919 290
New Orleans 1915 275
Galveston 1915 275
Camille 1969 255
New England 1938 255
Diane (Northeast US) 1955 185
Georgia/So-No Carolina 1898 180
Texas 1875 175
Southeast Florida 1906 165
Interesting.
UPDATE: April 13th, 2026
Shortly after I wrote this, Science Alert ran a story titled Ocean Heat Waves Are 'Supercharging' Hurricane Damage, Scientists Warn. In the piece the author describes a new study just published in the journal Science Advances that tells us:
Researchers looked at 1,600 tropical cyclones – the broader category of storms that includes hurricanes – that made landfall since 1981 and found those that went over the extra-hot water were more likely to intensify rapidly, a problem that's becoming more frequent. This resulted in 60% more disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage – adjusted for inflation – when they hit land...
One of the study's co-authors, Dr Gregory Foltz, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is quoted offering that "They're happening closer to land and more frequently, so I think people need to pay attention and know that these are more likely to result in extreme damage when they make landfall."
I don't really know what to make of this. What I can sort out is that tropical cyclones have been responsible for an estimated 1.9 million fatalities worldwide – over the last two centuries. [Whatever you do, don't notice that we lost at least 15-20 million in just two years directly from COVID-19...] Those impacts are highly concentrated in a small handful of catastrophic events, almost all in the least developed parts of Pakistan and India, coming off the Bay of Bengal or Arabian Sea, and nearly all more than 50 years ago. For instance, the 1970 Bhola cyclone, by far the worst in history, claimed perhaps as many as 500,000 lives; and just a couple more tropical cyclones, all occurring in the 1800s in the same places, resulted in around a million more of the remaining total global fatalities from these storms.
Too, much research has gone into discovering that even the worst storms do less immediate harm or structural damage than long-term impacts. It is not the wind and physical devastation that causes most of the cyclone-related harm but the rainfall and resulting respiratory issues and disease transmission that only arrive later.
Ultimately, thanks to science, technology, and global aid efforts we rarely see such events any longer. This is why we focus on the dollar figure of storm damage. And I have no doubt that if we fortified every building and piece of infrastructure with sexy, new 21st century materials, construction methods, and counter-storm architecture, such that no storm ever did any any structural damage, we would highlight catastrophic losses to farmland, forests, and coastlines and talk about how things have never looked so bad (while focusing all our research and analysis on just the prior two decades.)
FOR MORE SEE:
NOAA Technical Memorandum - The Deadliest, Costliest, and most Intense United States Hurricanes form 1900 to 2000
Weather Underground - The 30 Deadliest U.S. Mainland Hurricanes
