The 2021 Atlantic Hurricane Season ended last month as the third busiest on record but Texas for the most part avoided the wrath of tropical storms.
“"It was an active season," Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told Houston Public Media. "We've had 21 named storms. Usually, it's in the lower teens on average and seven of those made it to hurricane status, with four major hurricanes. For the most part it stayed away from the United States, except unfortunately for Hurricane Ida which slammed into Louisiana."
The 21 named storms last year came on the tumultuous heels of 2020, the busiest Atlantic Hurricane Season ever with 30 named storms. 2021’s 21 storms trailed only the 2005 season when there were 28 named storms.
The Texas coastline, which can be in the bullseye for deadly storms such as 2017’s Hurricane Harvey which brought catastrophic loss of life and property, was only the target of one storm in 2021.
Hurricane Nicholas lumbered along the eastern part of the Matagorda Peninsula in mid-September but weakened quickly to a tropical storm and ended up as a tropical depression.
“Even though Nicholas produced a lot of wind and power outages, it was a tropical storm as it moved through the Houston area. So in some ways Houston dodged a bullet again in that we didn't get a stronger hurricane and get a more direct hit," Dan Reilly, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Houston, told Houston Public Media.
Nicholas made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane, drenching areas with more than a foot of rain and knocking out power to approximately 500,000 homes and businesses.
While Galveston received almost 14 inches of rain from Nicholas, and Houston reported 6+ inches, it was only a fraction of the deluge from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 that set U.S. rainfall records with some spots recording 60+ inches over four days.
Houston Public Radio reported that after Harvey, “voters approved the issuance of $2.5 billion in bonds to fund flood-control projects, including the widening of bayous. The 181 projects designed to mitigate damage from future storms are at different stages of completion.”
Atlantic Hurricane Season landfalls in Texas are surely hit and miss with no storms making landfall in 2018 just one year after the devastation of Harvey.
In 2019 one storm, Tropical Storm Imelda, made landfall near Freeport with winds of just 40 mph but peak rainfall in Jefferson County resulted in rainfall of 40+ inches and was attributed to five deaths.
In 2020, three named storms hit the Texas coastline:
Texas neighbor to the east, Louisiana, suffered the brunt of tropical storm damage in 2021 including Hurricane Ida, which hit Port Fourchon in August with sustained winds of 150 mph.
In all, Ida caused more than $75 billion in damage and resulted in at least 115 deaths with the majority of destruction in Louisiana, New Jersey and New York.
For the record, here were the 21 named storms for the 2021 Atlantic Hurricane Season, with peak winds, estimated damage if any, and U.S. landfall if any: