Hurricanes like Helene continue to kill years after they hit

Hurricanes in the United States are turning out to be hundreds of times deadlier than the government estimates, contributing to more American deaths than car crashes or all of the nation’s wars, a new study said.

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, which exceeds the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts from a hurricane, the study in the journal Nature concluded from Wednesday. The study authors said that even with Hurricane Helene’s triple-digit direct death toll, many more people will die in part from this storm in the coming years.

“Watching what happened here makes you think this is going to be a decade of hardship, not just what happens in the next two weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a co-author of the study and former White. Science and Technology House Official.

“After every storm there’s kind of this increase in additional mortality in a state that’s been affected that hasn’t been previously documented or associated in any way with hurricanes,” Hsiang said.

Hsiang and University of California Berkeley researcher Rachel Young looked at hurricane deaths in a different way than previous studies, opting for a longer-term analysis of the public health and economics of what’s called excess mortality. They looked at states’ death rates after 501 different storms that hit the United States between 1930 and 2015. And what they found is that after each storm there is a “decline” in the death rate.

It’s a statistical signature that I see over and over again, Hsiang said. Similar analyzes are being done for heat waves and other health threats such as pollution and disease, he said. They compare to periods before the storm and adjust for other factors that could cause changes in death rates, he said. Complicating it all is that the same places keep getting hit by multiple storms, so there are death blows upon death blows.

How storms contribute to human deaths after immediate impact is something that needs further study, Hsiang said. But he theorized that it includes the effects of stress on health, changes in the environment including toxins, people unable to afford health care and other needs due to storm costs, infrastructure damage and government spending changes.

“When someone dies years after a hurricane hits, the cause will be recorded as a heart attack, stroke or respiratory failure,” said Andrew Dessler, a climatologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved from the study but did similar. heat and cold death studies. “The doctor cannot know that a hurricane contributed/triggered the illness. You can only see it in a statistical analysis like this.”

Initially, Hsiang and Young thought the storm surge would disappear in a few months, but they were surprised when they examined hundreds of surges and found that they had been slowly spreading over 15 years, Hsiang said.

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

These people don’t realize that 10 or 15 years later their health problems are somehow associated with a storm, but Hsiang said it shows up in the data: “They wouldn’t have died at those times if the storm hadn’t be come And essentially, these storms accelerate the death of people.”

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

How big are the numbers?

Storms are a factor in between 55,000 and 88,000 excess deaths per year, the study concluded. So for the 85 years studied, the team calculated between 3.6 and 5.2 million people died, storms being a factor. That’s more than the 2 million deaths in car crashes during that time, the study said.

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

Hsiang said he and Young have seen an upward trend in hurricane-related deaths, mainly due to population growth. Since 2000, there’s been a big jump in the total volume of storms that hit large populations, he said.

Three outside scientists said the study made sense.

“It looks like what they’re doing is reasonable,” said University at Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero, who was not part of the research. “The numbers are truly staggering.”

Texas A&M’s Dessler said this is an important study because it brings home the deadly nature of climate change and extreme weather. He said he and his fellow climate scientists were accurate in their warnings about the physics of what climate change would mean, but failed to emphasize enough how it would hurt people.

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

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Photo: Damage after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Horseshoe Beach, Florida on September 28. Photographer: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

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