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.

Who founded the American Red Cross?

Clara Barton (1821-1912) dominates the early history of the American Red Cross, which was modeled after the International Red Cross. She did not originate the Red Cross idea, but she was the first person to establish a lasting Red Cross Society in America. She successfully organized the American Association of the Red Cross in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 1881. Created to serve America in peace and in war, during times of disaster and national calamity, Barton's organization took its service beyond that of the International Red Cross Movement by adding disaster relief to battlefield assistance. She served as the organization's volunteer president until 1904.

U.S. Armed Forces have highly skilled medical staff as part of their fighting force, why does the American Red Cross send its members into battle?

In 1905, the U.S. Congress granted a charter to the American Red Cross that required it to act "in accord with the military authorities as a medium of communication between the people of the United States and their armed forces." Since then, the Red Cross has provided communications and other humanitarian services to help members of the U.S. military and their families around the world. Living and working in the same difficult situations and dangerous environment as U.S. troops, Red Cross staff have given comfort to soldiers thousands of miles from home by providing emergency messages, about deaths and births, for example, comfort kits and blank cards for troops to send home to loved ones.