Now let’s see what are the biggest, deadliest, most devastating hurricanes to hit the United States. Insider Monkey’s article will bring you to the world of the natural catastrophes. Hurricanes usually formed around the coasts of Africa. By the time they reach America, they either gain on strength, or they disappear completely. The first option is the scariest. On the bright side, sometimes a hurricane loses strength, and it turns into a storm on its landfall. Actually, it doesn’t have to be as good as it sounds. For instance, the name Sandy doesn’t bring associations to Sandy from the movie Grease anymore. Rather it makes everyone shiver at the thought of hurricane Sandy, or a tropical storm, to be more precise. Hurricane Sandy was “only” a category three hurricane before it hit the States, but it downsized to a tropical storm on landfall. The storm destroyed or damaged around 650,000 homes and caused death to 159 people.
Now without a further ado let’s see what Insider Monkey has investigated for us. We have picked three of the biggest, deadliest, most devastating hurricanes to hit the United States from their list.
The first one is Hurricane Opal. Hurricane Opal was formed in September, but disaster hit in October at Pensacola Beach, Florida. Once again, it was lucky that the hurricane had already unleashed its fury elsewhere (Mexico). Still, the damage caused would’ve equaled 2.1 billion dollars today. Hurricane Hugo ranks 2nd on our list of biggest, deadliest, most devastating hurricanes to hit the United States. It completely devastated the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and South and North Carolina. It all started with a cluster of thunderstorms and ended up with a catastrophe. It must be stressed that over 1 billion board-feet of lumber (70% of all lumber-quality trees) fell in the Francis Marion National Forest located in South Carolina. This caused for the whole logging operation to cease, and consequently, the wood quality was so low that loggers were selling it at half the price. Imagine the effect on the family budget. Hurricane Andrew should be the last one for today. When if finally hit Florida, it belonged to Category 5 and only a bit later developed into a category 4 hurricane. Sadly, 63,000 homes were destroyed and 124,000 were damaged. But people weren’t the only ones to suffer. 187 million freshwater fish were killed in the basin and Bayou Lafourche.
