You're right, I was wrong...on the average. Hell of a skew from Katrina.
But you do understand that those stats do not include automobile deaths that were winter related, correct?
They also don't include hurricane-related deaths not directly attributable to the storm, which would make the number far higher. Stress-induced deaths, people on vents who died when the power went down and the generators were underwater, people too frail to survive evacuation, people who succumbed to the heat without power and the cold without power or gas, etc -- these aren't typically included in the counts.
I've ridden out some pretty nasty snowstorms in Indiana and in the Mountain West and tornadoes in Texas and Oklahoma. Tornadoes are significantly more dangerous than hurricanes in the immediate area of destruction -- they're far more lethal and provide immeasurably less warning. Unless you're in a precarious living situation -- you don't have the resources to evacuate or you need power to survive -- snowstorms and hurricanes are probably roughly equally dangerous while they're ongoing. It's the aftermath that separates them.
After a Katrina-type hurricane, you may well not have a home anymore, and if you do, you likely won't have power for about a month. I moved out of a badly flooded house after Katrina and into one owned by a few friends that had only gotten minor flooding. We got our power back in late September, but any time there was even a light rain, it knocked out the entire grid for hours and sometimes days. Our gas worked, so we used the oven for heat most nights during that winter. Several neighbors had gotten water in their gas lines, so they would come sleep in our kitchen when the power went out. Very few stores were open until late winter -- most of our food came from trips to Baton Rouge or from the National Guard. Work was entirely devoted to cleanup for a solid 4-5 months. A good friend's husband died in the storm, so we spent October gutting his outpatient clinic while working in groups and armed because people with addictive disorders had gotten extremely desperate and taken to breaking in a few times a week (the clinic had never stocked opioids, but they didn't know any better and their dealers and local pharmacies were all out of commission). We lived under a curfew until probably December. People really started coming back around March, when the winter faded and the power really started working. I don't remember when we stopped seeing those awful blue tarps over everyone's roofs -- feels like maybe late the next summer. Some of the infrastructure issues it created will never be fixed -- weird quirks in the water systems, permanent relocations, etc. That's a Katrina or an Andrew. The only thing I can imagine really comparing would be a major earthquake.
A large category 1 or a medium-sized category 2 are more comparable to a 30-year blizzard. Small immediate threat to life. 3-4 days without power and a week or so of impassable roads. I'd probably take the hurricane, if I had to pick. A category 3-5 versus a snowstorm? Give me the snowflakes all day.
