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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.
Ariel Ley/AFP via Getty Images
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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.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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