Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2023.For the last 35 years or so, most Americans who have died during hurricane events are among the most vulnerable in society – low-income, immigrants and communities of color.
These excess death counts include more than the people who died during the storm and as a direct result of it, such as drowning. The fatalities also account for cases where residents died in the months after the storm from a condition that was exacerbated or developed by the extreme weather event, such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease like heart attacks. Similar outcomes can happen to people with respiratory, neurological, parasitic and infectious diseases.
The overall trend showed greater death tolls happening in more recent years. The analysis revealed that 83% of post-hurricane deaths and 70% of the post-gale deaths occurred from 2004 to 2019. The data is in line with“In some ways Sandy is an outlier because the Northeast is one of the more affluent places in the United States, but the death count was rather large,” said, PhD, the study’s lead author and an environmental health science professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.
The outcomes are not just limited to heart attacks and strokes. After a flood, the resulting mold can impact residents for years after the storm.Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, Columbia University, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia and senior author of the study. “If you lose property or if you've evacuated, your stress levels are off the roof, and stress is a big predictor of all of these outcomes.