The Washington Post

Why Hurricane Harvey has a drastically lower death toll than Katrina

As the floodwaters recede in Houston, the search continues for victims not yet counted in the death toll for Hurricane Harvey. But one expert is confident that the final tally will be nowhere near what it was for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.

The exact number of deaths attributed to Katrina is not known. Most estimates put the number around 1,800. In contrast,  Harvey has been blamed for 31 deaths so far.  

That number is sure to rise but not to Katrina levels, said John Mutter, a Columbia University professor specializing in natural disasters who conducted a study on Katrina’s death toll.

Harvey “won’t go to a number like Katrina’s. It’s too big a leap,” Mutter said. “You’d have to say either there are a lot of bodies that have not been discovered, or that the hurricane still has got some nasty work ahead."

Harvey hasn’t disappeared, though it is a shadow of what it was when it first struck Texas. “But it would be surprising if the death toll went from what it is now to numbers like Katrina,” Mutter said.  

Better informed

Several factors explain why Harvey’s death toll is lower than Katrina’s, Mutter said.

People were much better informed before Harvey hit the Texas coast and in the days afterward when the storm lingered over the southeast part of the state. “Remember that Katrina was 12 years ago, and things like Twitter and social media have become a lot more advanced, so there is more information out there,” Mutter said.

Each storm had a different impact, he said. Katrina was more of a storm surge, with ocean water rapidly flooding  New Orleans and overwhelming its levees. In Houston, the flooding was mostly caused by rain, which took longer to accumulate to flood levels, giving residents more time to leave.

Hard on poor, elderly

Disasters of this magnitude hit hardest on the poor and elderly because of their lack of resources and mobility, Mutter said. Houston is a much more mobile place than New Orleans. It has an extensive network of highways and most people have cars, he said.

In contrast, in New Orleans, particularly in the hard-hit Lower 9th Ward, “most people didn’t have cars and there was poor public transportation,” he said.

Jeremiah Ward wears his makeshift shoes after he was rescued in the 9th Ward on Aug. 30, 2005 in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.(Irwin Thompson/The Dallas Morning News)
(Irwin Thompson/The Dallas Morning News)

The hardest-hit areas in New Orleans, including the 9th Ward, were also some of the most densely-populated parts of the city. “And there were a lot of people in those areas who either couldn’t leave or chose not to leave. They were hurt the worst by the flooding.”

Houston also has poor, densely-populated areas, but “not to the extent they were found in New Orleans,” Mutter said.  

Mutter, who has spent much of his career studying earthquakes, decided to look at Katrina because the number of deaths was so high. “Two thousand is a ridiculously large number of deaths for a storm in the United States. That should never have happened,” he said.

“If you think about numbers like that, you have to go all the way back to the [1900] hurricane in Galveston,” in which the death toll has been estimated between 6,000 and 12,000.

Mutter's study, which attributed about 2,000 deaths to Katrina, included elderly people who died in the weeks after the storm. Official death estimates often cut off arbitrarily within a few days of the storm, he said.

Their deaths should count, Mutter said.

“These storms are enormously distressing to elderly people," he said.