Prepare to be blown away with our 12 biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world! We sure hope you haven’t experienced any of these.
In today’s world when we are surrounded by so many gadgets, and we got completely used to creature comforts, we (mistakenly) have the idea that people rule the world. We’ve conquered every part of this planet, from east to west. There’s isn’t a single spot in which a man hasn’t looked for Pokemon, or at least sent a robot to explore. We are deciding about the destiny of so many living creatures, and it feels righteous to say we are the rulers of the planet. The man is changing the Earth’s surface by constant drilling and digging, building new roads and houses, constructing dams and lakes, digging tunnels through mountains and even under the sea. You can’t help but feel powerful. The man is the king of the world. Or at least until disaster strikes.
That disaster comes more than often in the form of a hurricane. It is literally destroying everything the man has put so much effort to build: roads, homes, buildings… When a hurricane strikes, the man is again a humble creature hiding from nature’s (super) powers. With one gust, a whole home can be destroyed, and with it, all the family’s endeavor erased in one second! We’ll talk about the damage in our article, but now would be a time for some theoretical knowledge (hopefully you’ve escaped the practical part so far).
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How do hurricanes form? They start rather modestly, with a simple tropical storm somewhere over the Atlantic and Pacific, near the equator. With the moisture evaporating, a hurricane rises until enormous amounts of heated air are twisted in the atmosphere. Strong winds begin to circulate counterclockwise north of the equator, or clockwise south of the equator. Officially, there’s no big problem until the winds move at speeds less than 74 miles per hour. However, while the hurricane hovers over the water which is 79F or warmer, it continues to grow in size and force since it’s pulling the moisture from the surface. That’s how eventually strong hurricanes are formed. Naturally, once a hurricane hits the ground, it begins to lose its strength, but that is often neglected. By the way, if a hurricane is formed near the Philippines and the China Sea, it’s called a typhoon. One of the strongest typhoons ever recorded on Earth is definitely Typhoon Haiyan which had hit the Philippines in 2013, with winds of 195mph. To make the matters clear, we’re talking here only about storms to the east of the International Date Line – hurricanes.
In order to answer the question: what was the biggest hurricane in the world, we inspected how you rank hurricanes. Natural Hurricane Center has the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale which has a rating system from 1 to 5, based on a hurricane’s sustained wind speed. Of course, all the hurricanes we’ll be mentioning belong to the 5 category, with winds of minimum speed 157 mph (252 km per hour). As defined, the catastrophic damage will occur in such cases. The next logical step in finding the strongest hurricanes ever was to check the hurricanes’ speed at WUWT, NBC News and Business Insider. The 1900 great Galveston hurricane was devastating with thousands of victims but is ranked as “only” category 4 hurricane. Since there were a lot of hurricanes with the same speed, we couldn’t decide on the strongest hurricane ever recorded on Earth with only speed as its criteria. Therefore, we decided to look for the most devastating hurricanes in history, i.e., the ones that created the biggest material damage. We checked for that information at several places — NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), Jamaica Observer, Hurricane Science, Cuba Hurricanes, Corozal, The Balance and SunSentinel.
To summarize, the hurricanes are ranked according to their speed, from the lowest to the highest. In cases when they were of the same speed, the one that caused greater demise came higher on the list. If you wish to know what is the largest hurricane ever recorded in the US, click on our 15 Biggest, Deadliest, Most Devastating Hurricanes To Hit The United States. By the way, you might wish to avoid these top 10 natural disaster prone countries with the worst most costly disasters in the world if you are to live a long and happy life.
Finally, here are 12 biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world. Remember, stay safe!
12. Andrew
Wind: 175 mph
Year: 1992
Damage: $26.5 million
Hurricane Andrew was the worst hurricane in Florida. Even though it wasn’t the widest hurricane ever, so much territory was razed to the ground that people still shudder at the very thought of it. It caused massive evacuations: 517,000 left Miami-Dade County, 300,000 abandoned Broward County, and 315,000 escaped from Palm Beach County. 10,000 jobs were created to rebuild South Florida since hurricane Andrew tore down 25,524 homes and damaged another 100,000.
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11. Cuba
Wind: 175
Year: 1932
Damage: $40 million
Fortunately, Cuba isn’t known as the area which is frequently hit by violent storms. However, in 1932 the country faced one of the most powerful storms ever. It built a huge wave of six meters of height and killed 3,033 people.
Pixabay/ Public Domain
And now, let’s see the top ten biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world.
10. David
Wind: 175 mph
Year: 1979
Damage: $95 million
Hurricane David is one of the most destructive and deadly Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded. After demolishing the Caribbean, the hurricane headed to south Florida and made landfall at West Palm Beach, until it finally disappeared near New Smyrna Beach. The Sunshine State experienced $95 million in damage.
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9. Camille
Wind: 175
Year: 1969
Damage: $1.42 billion
Hurricane Camille started off as just one more inverted “V”-shaped tropical wave off the African coast on August 5, 1969. By August 17, it turned into a gigantic hurricane. Camille made landfall in far western Cuba somewhere between Guano and Cape San Antonio and left around 20,000 people homeless.
Pixabay/ Public Domain
8. Mitch
Wind: 180 mph
Year: 1998
Damage: $5 billion
Hurricane Mitch was the 13th named storm of the 1998 Atlantic Hurricane Season, and it was unlucky indeed for the population of Nicaragua and Honduras. The final number of victims is still not known, but at least 11,000 people were killed, and 9,191 were missing. Over 20% of Honduras’s population was homeless after the catastrophic hit the hurricane had made. Also, 70% of total crops in Honduras were lost, including 80% of banana crops.
Pixabay/Public Domain
7. Rita
Wind: 180 mph
Year: 2005
Damage: $10 billion
People of Houston still remember that September. Fortunately, they were well prepared, and around 2.5 million people hit the road before the storm’s arrival. To fully grasp the picture of the chaos, imagine 600,000 people arriving into a county with only 70,000 residents.
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6. Labor Day Hurricane
Wind: 185 mph
Year: 1935
Damage: $ 6 million
Labor Day is one of few 12 biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world which doesn’t have its official human name. Of course, the disaster hit on 1st May 1935. The Labor Day hurricane was one of the first category 5 hurricanes to hit the States in the 20th century. We won’t bother you with the descriptions, but we’d rather just say how one year later, the 17-foot-tall Florida Keys Memorial was built on Upper Matecumbe Key in memory of the hurricane victims.
Pixabay/Public Domain
Up next, we have top five biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world.
5. Gilbert
Wind: 185 mph
Year: 1988
Damage: $4 billion
Hurricane Gilbert unleashed fury on Jamaica in September 1988, with much of the population unprepared for it. It’s interesting and unfortunate to say that according to the NOAA, Gilbert’s remnants created 29 tornadoes over Texas. Gilbert’s force was such that its impacts were felt in Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries.
Pixabay/ Public Domain
4. Wilma
Wind: 185 mph
Year: 2005
Damage: $20.6 billion
Hurricane Wilma ranks 4th on our list of biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world. It is said to be the most unusual tropical system in a most unusual Atlantic hurricane season. It had the lowest central pressure ever recorded of any Atlantic hurricane on record at 882 millibars (26.05 inches). Also, it brought rain. Lots of rain. Yucatan was devastated. Reportedly, 64.3 inches of rain (1633.98 mm) fell in 24 hours at Islas Mujeres, which is the largest 24-hour rainfall ever noted in the Northern Hemisphere.
Pixabay/ Public Domain
3. Irma
Wind: 185 mph
Year: 2017
Damage: $100 billion
We are continuing our list of biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world with hurricane, which is Irma occasionally praised as the largest hurricane ever recorded on Earth, and that’s due to 300,000 square miles that the hurricane’s cloud field was covering at its peak. Basically, that’s a shadow bigger than Texas. The Caribbean islands and Florida took the hit.
Pixabay/Public Domain
2. Allen
Wind: 190 mph
Year: 1980
Damage: $3 billion
In the early morning of August 10, 1980, hurricane Allen made landfall in Brownsville, Texas. Its destruction path started in the Caribbean Sea, over the Gulf of Mexico, and finally ended in Texas and Mexico. There were low casualties due to scarcely populated areas, but it spawned tornadoes. One of them in Austin, Texas.
Pixabay/Public Domain
1. Patricia
Wind: 200 mph
Year: 2015
Damage: less than $200 million
Hurricane Patricia ends our list of 12 biggest hurricanes ever recorded in the world. With its shocking speed of 200 mph, it is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the world. Saying that it hit Mexico hard would be an understatement. It is also known as one of the fastest developing monster storms because its winds were increasing about 120 mph in 24 hours. Such was its impact on general public and scientists that there were suggestions of creating a completely new hurricane category for monster storms of this size. Hopefully, we won’t be needing new categories soon enough.
Pixabay/Public Domain
