Hurricanes like Helene are deadly when they strike and keep killing for years to come

Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation's wars, a new study said.

The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane's aftermath, the study in Wednesday's journal Nature concluded. Study authors said even with Hurricane Helene's growing triple digit direct death count, many more people will die partly because of that storm in future years.

“Watching what's happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what's happening over the next couple of weeks,” said Stanford University climate economist Solomon Hsiang, a study co-author and a former White House science and technology official.

“After each storm there is sort of this surge of additional mortality in a state that’s been impacted that has not been previously documented or associated with hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang said.