By State › Indiana

Indiana: Risks & Trends

Download all of Indiana as PDF Print

Same standard as every other page on this site: every figure below is independently sourced, and figures that vary across sources, or measure genuinely different things, are flagged as such rather than collapsed into one number that looks more precise than the underlying data actually supports.

The Palm Sunday Outbreak (1965): Indiana’s deadliest tornado event

MetricFigure
Indiana tornadoes 10
Indiana deaths 137
Indiana injuries 1,200+
Six-state outbreak total tornadoes 47 (55 confirmed across some counts)
Six-state outbreak total deaths 271
National ranking 4th deadliest tornado outbreak in U.S. history
Damage (1965 dollars, all states) ~$250 million

The outbreak’s severity, including 18 tornadoes rated F4, was a direct catalyst for major improvements to the national severe weather warning system in the years that followed.

August 2026 floods: a 113-year-old record broken

MetricFigure
Start date August 11, 2026
Peak rainfall (New Castle, ~32 hrs) 11+ in, a 1-in-1,000-year event
Indiana deaths 7+
White River crest at Anderson 24.9 ft, exceeding the 1913 record
Regional power outages (from the accompanying derecho) 1 million+ customers
Indiana peak outages ~300,000
Delaware County evacuations (as of Aug. 15) 350+

This is a recent, still-developing event

Because this flooding happened in the weeks before this page was written, some figures, particularly the final death toll and total damage estimate, may still be updating as recovery continues. The numbers above reflect what was confirmed in contemporary reporting at the time of writing; check current sources for the latest confirmed totals.

What these two have in common

The Palm Sunday Outbreak and the August 2026 floods, separated by more than 60 years, both demonstrate the same practical point about Indiana specifically: the state’s worst-case severe weather events aren’t confined to memory. A record set in 1913 held for over a century before a single storm broke it, and Indiana’s deadliest tornado outbreak remains the deadliest on record six decades later, not because nothing worse has threatened since, but because both events represent genuinely extreme tails of Indiana’s ordinary severe weather patterns.

Sources