Katrina Joins List of 10 Deadliest U.S. Disasters

Editor's Note: LiveScience first put Katrina into historical perspective in an Aug. 30 story as the catastrophe was barely unfolding. The story below contains more information and a broader context.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Hurricane Katrina already has the tragic notoriety of being among the 10 deadliest natural disasters to strike the United States, even with some of the dead apparently still uncounted.

So far, the official toll across five states is at 659, with New Orleans accounting for two-thirds of the dead. Those numbers, while horrific, raised the possibility that earlier fears of fatalities reaching 10,000 or more might not prove true.

If casualties rose that high, it would place the devastation in New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast with such disasters as the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 or the Johnstown Flood of 1889, cataclysmic events that reshaped government policy and captured the nation's sympathy for generations.

"In recent history, this one's bound to be an extraordinary disaster,'' said Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M. That's not only because of the deaths and destruction, but also because of the vast numbers of people displaced, Peacock and other experts said.

"Just the fact that a major American city had to be evacuated, there's no precedent for that,'' said Theodore Steinberg, author of "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America,'' and a history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Hurricane Andrew in 1992, up until now the most expensive hurricane, killed just 26 people, most in southern Florida. It doesn't even rank among the top 10 deadliest natural disasters.

Katrina, for now, has accounted for more deaths than the previous 10th deadliest disaster, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, a category 5 storm that struck the Florida Keys and killed an estimated 405 people.

Taking roughly 700 lives each were the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 (720 deaths estimated), the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 (700 deaths estimated), the Georgia-South Carolina Hurricane of 1881 (700 deaths estimated) and the Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which took an estimated 695 lives in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

Only the deadliest five U.S. disasters killed 1,000 or more.

These include the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, with some 8,000 deaths; the Great Okeechobee Hurricane that struck Florida in 1928, with more than 2,500 dead; the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Flood, 1889, estimated 2,200-plus; and two hurricanes in 1893 -- one in Louisiana that killed more than 2,000, and one in South Carolina and Georgia that took somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 lives, according to Rusty Pfost, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

And the toll doesn't even compare to some of the sweeping devastation seen around the world, such as last year's tsunami or the deaths in Central America caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

Steinberg said Katrina's latest toll places it squarely with a type of disaster that most lists don't even consider -- deadly heat waves. He compared it to the 1995 heat wave in the Midwest that killed somewhere between 400 and 700 people, most in the Chicago area.

But the 2005 disaster may lodge itself more firmly in the public mind because of the searing images that came with it of evacuees left for days without food and water, the ineffectiveness of government officials, and the larger questions of national security that have preoccupied Americans since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"As with other events, as time passes, the collective knowledge diminishes and people tend to forget about it,'' said Havidan Rodriguez, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. "We failed in terms of preparedness and response to this event. We can't really afford to forget.''