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The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was the deadliest in nearly two decades
Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm at the time of this photograph, is pictured in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Yucatan Peninsula on October 8, 2024 seen from the International Space Station as it orbited 257 miles above.
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MIAMI — One of the deadliest and most costly hurricane seasons ever seen in the Atlantic officially comes to a close on Saturday.
The six-month season brought 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes, five of which made landfall in the U.S. There were hundreds of deaths in the U.S., Central America and the Caribbean.
In the U.S., more than 150 people died from direct causes in the season’s deadliest storm, Hurricane Helene, which tore through Florida and Georgia and brought severe flooding and destruction to North Carolina and in eastern Tennessee.
Before the season began, scientists warned there were likely to be a lot of hurricanes. Record-high ocean temperatures in the Atlantic two to three degrees warmer than normal and other atmospheric conditions set the stage for the above-normal activity.
In late June, Hurricane Beryl formed in the Atlantic and strengthened into a Category 5 storm with 165-mile-per-hour winds. It was the earliest in the season that a Category 5 hurricane had ever formed. It weakened significantly before landfall but caused severe flooding and deaths in the Houston area.
In September, the season’s deadliest storm left a path of destruction from Florida to North Carolina. Hurricane Helene came ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a category 4 storm with 140-mile-per-hour winds. It weakened as it moved inland but dropped as much as 30 inches of rain on some parts of western North Carolina. There was severe flooding throughout the region with extensive damage in Asheville and many smaller communities in North Carolina and Tennessee. In North Carolina, as many as 90 people died in Helene’s floodwaters.
Helene’s impact and number of fatalities were the greatest seen in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina almost two decades ago.
An aerial view of flood damage wrought by Hurricane Helene along the Swannanoa River on October 3, 2024 in Asheville, N.C. At least 200 people were killed in six states in the wake of the powerful hurricane which made landfall as a Category 4.
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
Days before it hit, the Hurricane Center’s forecasts were remarkably accurate. Meteorologists warned there would be catastrophic flooding in western North Carolina days in advance. But, the director of the National Hurricane Center, Michael Brennan says, “It’s difficult when you have an event that’s never been seen before in a community to convey what that impact is going to necessarily look like on the ground. And it’s also challenging because that level of flooding happened over such a large area.”
Helene was one of five major hurricanes this season, two of which reached Category 5. Just two weeks after Helene, Hurricane Milton strengthened to a Category 5 storm, but weakened before making landfall. It came ashore on Florida’s Gulf coast as a Category 3 storm with 120 mile-per-hour winds.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania says climate change is making hurricanes more powerful and deadly. He says, “We are headed towards a larger number of extremely intense storms that do far more damage and lead to far greater levels of mortality driven by the warming of the oceans from carbon pollution.”
One factor is the warm sea temperatures that are helping storms strengthen dramatically over the course of several hours, a phenomenon known as rapid intensification. Mann says, “It can be a tropical depression one day and all of a sudden within 24 or 48 hours it’s a major hurricane. And it becomes extremely difficult to plan for.”
A man dries a mattress after Hurricane Oscar hit the town of Imias in Guantanamo province, Cuba, on October 30, 2024. Oscar strengthened from a depression to a hurricane in just five hours.
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Ariel Ley/AFP via Getty Images
In October, Hurricane Oscar went from a small tropical depression to hurricane strength in just five hours. The National Hurricane Center had to scramble to issue warnings to Cuba and other Caribbean islands.
Climate scientist Daniel Gilford says warming ocean temperatures are pushing hurricane intensities up by an average of 18 miles per hour. In a recent study, he analyzed the last several seasons. He says, “Five out of every six hurricanes had this really strong statistically robust signal where human-caused climate change was really clearly increasing the intensity of these storms.” Gilford says because of climate change, hurricanes are now a full category higher than they would have been in earlier decades.
Penn climatologist Michael Mann says that with the laws of physics, “If you have 10% increase in wind speeds from human-caused warming, that will lead to a 33% increase in the destructive potential of these storms.” Fueled by the extra heat from the ocean, storms are also picking up more moisture and then dropping it in heavy rainfall events, such as that seen when Helene hit North Carolina.
Gilford, a researcher with Climate Central says, as hurricanes grow larger, stronger and wetter they’re posing an increased threat to inland areas far from the coast. “Hurricane Helene is especially a lesson that certain places that maybe wouldn’t have been experiencing these intense effects before really are today because of climate change,” he said.
Along with hundreds of deaths, damage from all storms this season is estimated at more than $190 billion. That’s second only to 2017, the year of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.
Now-former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his primary election night event on June 9 in Blue Hill, Maine. Platner officially dropped out of the race July 10 following rape allegations from a former romantic partner that he denies.
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Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for Senate, is officially out of the race.
The Maine Secretary of State said Platner filed the necessary paperwork to withdraw his candidacy two days after he announced he planned to do so following an accusation of rape by a former romantic partner. Platner denies the allegation.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick Platner’s replacement.
In his withdrawal notice, Platner said “people are desperate for change” and that’s why they voted “for a new kind of politics” by making him the Democratic nominee. He expressed gratitude for those who supported his campaign and said that he will continue to fight for “the movement we have built together and the future we believe in.”
He ended his notice with a strong statement aligned with the progressive platform.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts.”
Platner announced his plan to withdraw from the race in an 11-minute video he posted to social media on July 8. He said he had no choice but to suspend his campaign, citing it was no longer viable financially.
“We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function,” he said.
Platner added that dropping out was not an admission of guilt. Rather, the decision, he said, is to keep the progressive movement in Maine alive to defeat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. Platner blamed the “political establishment” for his downfall and argued the goal was to force him out of the race.
“We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change and we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me,” he said.
Many powerful Democrats and progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, urged Platner to step down.
Platner has had to answer to a waterfall of scandals since he launched his Senate bid. Despite those, he ran away with the nomination in the June 9 primary, securing more than 150,000 votes — more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in Maine’s history.
Platner ran on a progressive platform centered on affordability, universal health care and getting corporate money and influence out of politics. During his campaign, he generated an undeniable amount of enthusiasm, something the Maine Democratic Party will have to harness if it hopes to beat Collins in the general election.
Multiple people have already launched campaigns to replace Platner, including former state Sen. Troy Jackson and former CDC official Nirav Shah, who both ran unsuccessful bids for governor.
Platner called on the replacement process to reflect “the Mainers who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”
“We were asking for real democracy, and we did it the right way. And we won. But now the ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment,” he added.
The Maine Democratic Party said that it intends to hold a new nominating convention where around 600 delegates will select Platner’s successor. Candidates have until July 15 to declare their intent to seek the nomination and gather signatures from at least 8 of Maine’s 16 counties. Party leadership added they will make the nomination process public and transparent.
A Waymo robotaxi drives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood this week.
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Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It’s the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.
The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo’s systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.
Waymo’s cars, equipped with an array of cameras, microphones and other sensors to monitor passengers and other nearby vehicles, are becoming more common in cities across the United States. Experts say the detention of the two teens in San Mateo highlights a potential — but not inevitable — trade-off between privacy and convenience. It also questions the extent to which companies similar to Waymo are required to hand over private data, including audio and video of passengers, in situations where a crime is suspected.
NPR reached out to Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for comment on the details of the San Mateo incident and how the company responded, but did not hear back. But on its website, the company says that as many as 29 cameras in its autonomous cars provide an all-around view and “are designed with high dynamic range and thermal stability, to see in both daylight and low-light conditions, and tackle more complex environments.”
“There already exist laws that govern duty to report or even duty to protect” for carriers such as Waymo, according to Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “The privacy problems arise when and if driverless carrier companies used such laws or ethical obligations as a pretext for blanket, indiscriminate accumulation of identifiable data for unspecified future purposes.”
That includes not just monitoring people inside the cars, but outside too. Take, for example, a hit-and-run investigation last year in Los Angeles. Media reported that the police inquiry was aided by video captured by a Waymo taxi that had a clear view of the crime. Critics suggested at the time that authorities were using the company’s vehicles as a mobile surveillance platform. And during 2025 protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, demonstrators vandalized Waymos, apparently angry that video recorded by the vehicles could be used by police, although there is no evidence that happened.
In a transparency report, Google says it received nearly 290,000 requests from governments worldwide in the first six months of 2025 for disclosure of user information across all its platforms, including Waymo. The company says that in more than 80% of the requests in those six months, some information was disclosed. “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all,” the company says.
In an email to NPR, San Mateo Police Department spokesperson Jeanine Luna said that detaining the teens in the Waymo on Monday was “wholly appropriate” under the circumstances. “We received the call of a ‘firearm’ being shot from a moving vehicle,” she said. “Furthermore, the occupants were described as being possibly ‘intoxicated.’” she said.
“Being that the vehicle was disabled (the occupants had every right to exit the vehicle before police arrival, but they did not), a high-risk traffic stop was conducted to ensure the safety of all involved,” Luna added. “They were not arrested and were released to their parents, however, potential charges are still pending dependent on what the video from inside the vehicle shows.”
Autonomous taxis represent an ethical gray area
Robotaxis began to roll out across the U.S. in December 2018, when Waymo launched in Phoenix. These services have been used for less than a decade — so the norms surrounding them aren’t settled, experts agree.
The Facebook post may make Waymo passengers wonder what triggers a police intervention, says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University. She has used Waymo’s driverless taxis and says ethically, the privacy issues surrounding them sit in a gray area. “There’s something about being in a car without another person that makes you think it’s private.”
“With all these recording devices, we don’t see them, [and] they’re not these obvious things being stuck in our faces,” Raicu adds.
That brings up a key issue: informed consent, Acquisti says.
“It is not clear the extent to which passengers … are reminded that when they step into the car, that they are being monitored, and most likely they are not told in its entirety how the data will be used,” he says.
Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and privacy expert and professor at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, believes that Waymo does have a compelling interest in protecting its vehicles. He compares monitoring a robotaxi via cameras to a human taxi driver keeping an eye on passengers in the rearview mirror.
“Maybe the driverless car comes back … and it has all of its cushions slashed, and it’s like, ‘Who the hell did that? Let’s go and look at the tape,’” Schneier suggests. “You can’t have sex in the back of a taxi, right? Someone would say, ‘Stop it.’”
He concludes that some supervision makes sense. In an Uber rideshare, he notes, “most of the time there’s a camera recording the back seat.” (Uber says on its website that it allows drivers to install such cameras for the purpose of “fulfilling transportation services.”)
Waymo robotaxis, while a fairly common sight in the San Francisco Bay Area, are still a novelty in much of the country. And many people are hesitant to ride in one, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. The survey found that only 5% of Americans had ever ridden in a driverless car. Meanwhile, 71% of those polled said they would feel uncomfortable in one, with only 7% saying they would be “extremely or very comfortable” riding in one.
For that reason, experts who spoke with NPR said they were optimistic that it’s not too late to shift gears on privacy norms and policies surrounding these vehicles.
Acquisti doesn’t see why privacy measures can’t be built into driverless vehicles.
“I would immediately challenge the notion that people have to be monitored,” he says, noting that privacy-preserving technologies exist and can be installed.
“Driverless cars are coming, but they don’t have to come in this particular incarnation,” Raicu says. “They’re still being designed and redesigned. It’s early days.”
Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.
“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
“It is irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a Thursday statement. “This move undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”
The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.
It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.
Reuters contributed reporting
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