The natural disaster with the highest death toll in U.S. history was the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900 in which an estimated 6,000 people were killed. Clara Barton, founder and president of the American Red Cross in 1900, gathered a team and traveled by train from Washington, D.C., to Galveston as soon as she heard the news of the disaster to provide relief.
Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on August 29, 2005, is the most expensive single, natural disaster in the organization’s history to date and necessitated the largest mobilization of Red Cross workers for a single relief operation. In the weeks and months that followed that devastating storm and two subsequent severe hurricanes—Rita and Wilma—that struck the Gulf Coast states during the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season, more than 233,000 Red Cross workers were activated and/or deployed to provide shelter, food, water and other immediate necessities for millions of storm survivors. Ninety-five percent of those workers were volunteers. As the response to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma shifted from emergency relief to providing recovery assistance, cost estimates for the operation reached $2.116 billion.