Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Check out this story I did for Time.com about the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history--which almost wiped Galveston off the map.

Why wasn’t there more talk of this after Hurricane Ike? It’s always fascinating to consider which disasters get forgotten. Often it has less to do with the amount of destruction--and more to do with what else was going on at the time.

That helps explain why so few of us know much about the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans.

Let me…

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Round and round we go. Any bets on how long until we get to Hurricane Omar? Check out my latest Time.com story about Why Disasters are Getting Worse. (Hint: It’s not because of climate change. Not mostly, anyway.)

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Gustav is churning through the Cayman Islands today, just in time for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It’s already clear that Gustav will be a serious hurricane when it makes landfall on the Gulf Coast late Monday or early Tuesday. Right now, it sure looks like it’s aiming for Louisiana, just like old times--although it could smack down anywhere from the Florida Panhandle to South Texas.

Other than that, Gustav feels a lot different from Katrina so far. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has been in Baton Rouge since…

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Imagine if your psychic told you you were going to get hit by a bus this summer. She wasn’t sure how fast the bus would be going, but she was pretty much sure it would hit you sometime between June 1 and November 30 (and probably in August or September, and certainly somewhere between Texas and Maine).

That’s what hurricane forecasters are telling Americans this year. The latest crystal ball reading just came out from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Like other predictions from other places this year, the forecast is not…

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It’s that time again! Hurricane predictions are out from Colorado State University. These predictions are like horoscopes: your brain knows they may be totally wrong, but there is something irresistible about them anyway.

So let’s indulge for a moment: just so you know, the CSU team now predicts a worse-than-average hurricane season, anticipating 8 hurricanes. (The average is 6.) This prediction is more dire than their December estimate because the forecasters have more data now. They make their predictions by comparing oceanic and atmospheric trends to periods before other, past hurricane seasons. They have only…

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