Notable Hurricanes

Hurricanes: Tropical Storm Science 🌀 Hazards 🌀 Notable Storms 🌀 Climate Change 🌀 Hurricanes Database 🌀 NC Landfalls

When taking a deep dive among the dozens of historical hurricanes that have affected North Carolina, several patterns emerge about these storms’ tracks, the impacts they brought, and the areas they affected.

While the categories below aren’t an official classification of storm types, they do offer a convenient and catchy way to characterize the sorts of storms that tend to affect our state, and some of the most notable hurricanes of each variety.

Coastal Crushers

These storm-surging, wind-whipping monsters are the textbook examples of classic Carolina hurricanes. Coming in off the Atlantic, often at major hurricane strength, they deliver their full force in our coastline communities.

Among our state’s early hurricane history, these storms – arriving almost unannounced – were a shocking and often deadly surprise for folks at the coast. During the “Great Beaufort Hurricane” in 1879, even then-governor Thomas Jarvis and his wife had to scramble to escape the Atlantic Hotel in the middle of the night as that Category-3 storm brought a rising tide along the Beaufort waterfront.

Sometimes, these sorts of storms literally change the shape of our coastline. Hurricane Isabel in 2003 carved a 1,700-foot inlet across the southern end of Hatteras Island, while Hurricane Irene in 2011 breached the northern end of the island. Both events cut off access to parts of the Outer Banks via Highway 12, the region’s only roadway connection to the mainland.

While it’s often the ocean-facing towns and beaches that bear the brunt of the storm surge and gusty winds, other parts of our coastline can feel the impacts as well. In 2019, the winds wrapping around Hurricane Dorian’s eye as it paralleled our coastline caused a devastating soundside storm surge in towns such as Oriental and Ocracoke.

Wild Windmakers

When a Coastal Crusher takes a fast track inland, its high winds can remain in tow as it reaches the Piedmont and other places far from the immediate coast. For these areas where hurricanes are rare and oak trees are common, the damage from a storm like this is easy to spot and hard to forget.

For baby boomers, that indelible storm was Hurricane Hazel in 1954. At its state-record Category-4 intensity at landfall, Hazel was a coastal crusher for sure, inundating Calabash with an 18-foot storm surge and demolishing “every pier in a distance of 170 miles.” After that, Hazel whipped up hurricane-force winds in Raleigh and Fayetteville, and it’s said that a third of all buildings east of Charlotte received some damage.

In 1989, another Category-4 at landfall left a trail of wind-blown destruction well inland. After crossing South Carolina, Hurricane Hugo reached Charlotte still packing 99-mph wind gusts, which shattered skyscraper windows and snapped trees across the western Piedmont. That helped make Hugo the first billion-dollar weather disaster in North Carolina.

And in 1996, more than 40 years after Hazel, a new wild windmaker arrived in the form of Hurricane Fran. Also at major-hurricane intensity at its landfall north of Wilmington, Fran flattened coastal communities and then toppled the new generation of oak trees across the Raleigh area. The extent of the damage and the number of impassable roads meant the power stayed off for three to four weeks in some areas.

Freshwater Flooders

The flat, river-crossed landscape of our Coastal Plain is prone to flooding during heavy rain like we can see from tropical storms, and those sorts of events have become much more common over the past 30 years, in part due to the effects of climate change.

The first storm in that recent sequence was Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which dropped up to 24 inches of rain across parts of eastern North Carolina less than two weeks after those same areas were soaked by Hurricane Dennis. That much moisture waterlogged the region and raised the Tar, Neuse, and Cape Fear rivers to record levels.

Many of those areas were flooded again by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Despite never making landfall in the state, Matthew still pulled in ample amounts of Atlantic moisture with rainfall rates of up to 7 inches per hour. The result was more record flooding in areas such as Fayetteville, at least 17 dam failures and the breach of a levee protecting downtown Lumberton, and 24 deaths in the state due to drowning in freshwater.

The extent and depth of both Floyd’s and Matthew’s floods were exceeded by Hurricane Florence in 2018. After slowing to a crawl after its landfall along our southern coastline, Florence dropped almost three feet of rain – or more than six months’ worth of precipitation – in some areas, which set new record river crests and flooded major roadways, including Interstates 40 and 95, to cut off access to areas including Wilmington for days.

Slope Soakers

Hundreds of miles from the coast, the Mountains of North Carolina might seem like a safe haven from hurricanes. However, remnant tropical storms moving over our high terrain can produce heavy rainfall and deadly flooding.

That was the case with the “Charleston Hurricane” of 1916, when an unassuming remnant storm saw its impacts supercharged when its remnant moisture rose up the mountain slopes and produced rainfall totals of more than 20 inches in parts of western North Carolina. The resulting floods along the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers overtook Asheville, while the floodwaters washed away bridges, mills, and railroad trestles along the Catawba River, leading to many of the 80-plus deaths from this event.

In September 2004, multiple remnant tropical storms collectively wreaked havoc on our mountain landscape. First, Hurricane Frances dropped almost two feet of rain and flooded areas around Asheville, cutting off the city’s water supply from the North Fork Reservoir when a pipeline was washed out. Just over a week later, Hurricane Ivan took a similar track across the Appalachians, and its rain falling on saturated ground triggered more flooding and hundreds of landslides.

Our mountain region saw a new flood of record from Hurricane Helene in 2024, which also became our state’s costliest and deadliest storm. Aided by a stalled frontal boundary ahead of the storm and with moist air feeding in from the fringes of Helene’s broad circulation, the storm produced three-day rainfall totals of more than 12 inches across a swath of the Mountains from Brevard to Boone. That created catastrophic flooding along major rivers in the Mountains that nearly wiped out entire towns such as Marshall and Chimney Rock.