United States

Hurricanes Harvey and Maria and the mass shootings in Las Vegas, Parkland, and Santa Fe

In August Hurricane Harvey, the most forceful storm to make landfall in the United States in more than a decade, inundated the Houston area. The city received more than 16 inches (400 mm) of rain in a 24-hour period. Catastrophic flooding claimed several lives, more than 100,000 homes were damaged, and thousands of people remained displaced months afterward. Already challenged by the events in Houston, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) responded to another natural disaster when Puerto Rico was hammered by Hurricane Maria, a nearly category 5 cyclone, in September. That storm caused more than $90 billion in property damage and left some 400,000 of the island’s electricity customers without power for nearly five months. Puerto Rico’s Department of Public Safety’s initial official death toll from the storm was 64 lives, but some later estimates put the figure in the thousands, and in August 2018 the Puerto Rican government upped the official estimate to nearly 3,000 deaths.

Mass shootings continued to afflict the country. In October 2017 in Las Vegas, 58 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded when a man used as many as 23 guns to rain fire on the audience of a country music festival from the window of a 32nd-floor hotel room. In February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, 14 students and three staff members were killed when a former student who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons went on a rampage. Some of the students who survived the shooting became outspoken advocates for tighter gun-control laws and played prominent roles in the March for Our Lives protest that drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018, as well as to some 800 other gun-control rallies across the country and around the globe. Nonetheless, fewer than two months later, on May 18 in Santa Fe, Texas, another 10 people were killed in a shooting at a high school.