Hurricanes like Helene are deadly when they hit and continue to kill for years

Hurricanes are hundreds of times deadlier in the United States than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all wars in the country, according to a new study.

The average storm that hits the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, dwarfing the average of 24 immediate and immediate deaths that the government counts after a hurricane, came the study in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Study authors said that despite the rising direct death toll from Hurricane Helene, many more people will die in the coming years, in part because of this storm.

“When you watch what happened here, you think this is going to be a decade of distress, not just what happens in the next few weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a co-author of the study and a former white man House Science and Technology Officer.

“After every storm, there is some kind of additional increase in mortality in an affected state that has not previously been documented or associated in any way with hurricanes,” Hsiang said.

Hsiang and University of California Berkeley researcher Rachel Young looked at hurricane deaths differently than previous studies, opting for a longer-term, public health and economic-focused analysis of so-called excess mortality. They examined state death rates after 501 different storms that struck the United States between 1930 and 2015. What they found was that there was an “increase” in death rates after each storm.

It's a statistical signature they see again and again, Hsiang said. Similar analyzes would be conducted for heat waves and other health threats such as pollution and disease, he said. They compare to pre-storm times and take into account other factors that could lead to changes in mortality rates, he said. To make matters worse, the same locations are repeatedly hit by multiple storms, resulting in death blow after death blow.

How storms contribute to human deaths after the immediate impact needs to be further studied, Hsiang said. But he expected that to include the health effects of stress, environmental changes including toxins, people unable to afford health care and other essentials because of storm costs, infrastructure damage and government spending changes.

“If someone dies a few years after the hurricane, the cause is recorded as a heart attack, stroke or respiratory failure,” Texas A said&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler was not involved in the study but has conducted similar studies on heat and cold deaths. “The doctor cannot possibly know that a hurricane caused/triggered the illness. You can only see that in a statistical analysis like this.”

Hsiang and Young originally expected the storm's death wave to disappear within a few months, but they were surprised when they examined hundreds of bumps and found that they were slowly expanding over 15 years, Hsiang said.

It's “almost like a trickle of mortality, because every month we're talking about five to 10 people dying earlier than they otherwise would have,” Hsiang said.

These people are unaware that their health problems are in any way related to a storm 10 or 15 years later, but Hsiang said this shows in the data: “They would not have died at that point if the storm had not arrived.” And so essentially these storms are accelerating the death of people.”

The numbers turned out to be so high that researchers continued to look for errors or complicating factors that they had missed. “It took us years to really fully accept that this was happening,” Hsiang said.

The study concludes that storms are responsible for 55,000 to 88,000 additional deaths per year. For the 85 years examined, the team calculated that between 3.6 and 5.2 million people died, with storms playing a role. That's more than the 2 million deaths from car accidents during that period, the study said.

Until now, the public viewed storms “as an inconvenience that is tragic for a small number of community members,” Hsiang said. But they actually pose “a major threat to public health,” he said.

Hsiang said he and Young saw a trend of increasing hurricane-related deaths, largely due to population growth. Starting in 2000, the total number of storms affecting large populations rose sharply, he said.

Three outside scientists said the study made sense.

“It seems like what they're doing is reasonable,” said Kristen Corbosiero, a hurricane expert at the University at Albany who was not involved in the research. “The numbers are truly shocking.”

Texas A&M's Dessler said this is an important study because it highlights the deadly nature of climate change and extreme weather. He said he and his fellow climate scientists had been accurate in their warnings about the physical significance of climate change, but had failed to sufficiently emphasize how much it would harm people.

“Reading this makes it clear that humanity is very vulnerable to weather shocks, even in an incredibly rich country like ours,” Dessler said in an email.

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