Recent Category 1 Gulf Hurricanes Have Been More Destructive Than You Might Think

Nate is expected to make landfall this weekend along the northern Gulf Coast, but is not expected to be nearly as intense as we've seen this season with hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Despite that, recent Gulf of Mexico Category 1 hurricanes over the past five years have illustrated that it doesn't take an intense hurricane to lead to significant impacts along the coast.

(MORE: Latest Nate Forecast | Interactive Track | Hurricane Central)

One such hurricane happened just one year ago.

Hurricane Hermine (Florida)

Matthew is probably the hurricane you remember from the 2016 hurricane season, and for good reason. It claimed over 500 lives in Haiti and left a swath of damage and flooding from coastal Florida to North Carolina.

Roughly one month before Matthew, however, Hurricane Hermine pushed ashore along the sparsely-populated Florida coast of Apalachee Bay on Sept. 2, 2016, with maximum estimated winds of 80 mph – a low-end Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale.

(MORE: October, November Northern Gulf Coast Hurricane Landfalls Quite Rare)

At the coast, it wasn't the wind that was the story.

Hermine's storm surge pushed water levels to 6.1 feet above the average high-tide level at Cedar Key, Florida, shattering a record for that location that stood since Hurricane Elena in 1985.

According to the National Hurricane Center's recap, citing the Florida Division of Emergency Management, 1,600 homes and businesses were rendered uninhabitable from either being destroyed or sustaining damage, primarily in Franklin, Wakulla, Taylor, Dixie and Levy counties.

Farther down the Gulf Coast, onshore winds well removed from Hermine produced 2 to 4 feet of inundation south of Cedar Key to the Tampa Bay metro and as far south as Fort Myers.

Torrential rainfall of up to 22 inches only exacerbated the flooding in this part of central Florida.

(FULL RECAP: Hurricane Hermine)

Hurricane Isaac (Louisiana)

Speaking of a forgotten storm, overshadowed by Superstorm Sandy later in 2012, Isaac struggled to become a hurricane until just before its slow landfall in Louisiana in late August 2012.

Despite this struggle, its large wind field generated an extensive storm surge along the Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to parts of Florida.

Hardest-hit were parts of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where storm tides up to 17 feet above ground level spilled over a back levee, swamping the community of Braithwaite and requiring some rescues from rooftops.

Major surge flooding also swamped unprotected parts of seven other Louisiana parishes, inundating parts of the cities of Slidell and LaPlace.

Surge flooding up to 9 feet above ground was estimated in southern Mississippi and was believed to have pushed north of Interstate 10 in some spots.

Amazingly, the Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana flowed backward for almost a full day due to both storm surge and high winds, triggering an 8-foot rise in river levels in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Isaac was not a particularly deadly hurricane, however. Officially, 34 deaths were directly attributed to Isaac, five of those in the U.S.

Nevertheless, an estimated 59,000 homes in Louisiana and at least another 6,000 homes in southern Mississippi were damaged by Isaac. More than 1 million were without power at some point during the storm in South Florida and Louisiana combined.

Hurricane Isaac's damage in the U.S. was estimated at $2.35 billion, according to the NHC's final report.

(MORE: 2017 Among Most Active Atlantic Hurricane Seasons on Record)

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been an incurable weather geek since a tornado narrowly missed his childhood home in Wisconsin at age 7. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.