FEMA estimates 25 percent of Florida Keys homes are gone

NAPLES, Fla. — During a hurricane in 1900, a storm surge rose out of the Gulf of Mexico and annihilated Galveston, Texas, killing about 8,000 men, women and children.

In 1935, at least 408 people died when another cyclone slammed into the Florida Keys, many of them World War I veterans working on construction projects.

And in 1957, Hurricane Audrey’s storm surges crashed into the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, killing 390 people.

Hurricane Irma, which collided with Florida over the weekend, was in a similar league as those storms in its sheer power, and the number of people living in vulnerable areas has only grown.

So how has the number of deaths — in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina as of Monday night — remained in single digits?

The answer is the modern science of hurricane monitoring and preparation, which has saved countless lives as forecasting, satellite monitoring and government planning have dramatically improved in recent decades.

One study in the journal Epidemiologic Reviews calculated that America suffered an average of 1,400 hurricane deaths per decade from 1910 to 1939, 700 deaths per decade from 1940 to 1969, and about 250 deaths per decade from 1970 to 1999.

“The number of people killed in hurricanes halves about every 25 years, in spite of the fact that coastal populations have been increasing, because of what we’re doing with forecasting,” said Hugh Willoughby, a professor of meteorology at Florida International University in Miami.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s errors in storm tracking have been cut in half in the last dozen years, giving residents 36 total hours of advance notice that a hurricane is expected, up from 24 hours five years ago, he said.

With Irma, he said, “The emergency response at all levels of state government was really, really good. They did the right things, they said the right things. They gave people good advice and they didn’t minimize the threat.”

Irma was one of the most powerful storms to ever crawl out of the Atlantic.

After ripping through Caribbean islands with Category 5 winds, killing at least 37 people, it weakened slightly as it took direct aim at Florida, whose explosive real estate development in recent decades has made it the nation’s third-most-populous state.

Florida was slammed with huge storm surges, violent winds and heavy rains that socked the peninsula from south to north, flooding towns and knocking out power to millions of people.

But the most shocking thing about Irma may be what it didn’t do: kill in large numbers.

The greatest threat from a hurricane comes not from its winds, but from its surges of ocean water that flood shorelines, leaving survivors in buildings little way to escape. A 2014 National Hurricane Center study estimated that 90 percent of American hurricane deaths were somehow water-related, mostly drownings. Between 5 percent and 10 percent of deaths were due to winds, not counting tornadoes.

The survival lesson is clear: Get people away from flood-prone areas.

All along the state’s Gulf and Atlantic coasts, people heeded forecasters’ predictions and government orders and evacuated before the danger hit.