Hurricane Francine in Landman: Real 2024 Storm or Pure Fictional Disaster?

Hurricane Francine in Landman: Is the 2024 Storm Real, and Did It Destroy Offshore Oil Rigs?

Viewers of Landman have latched onto one of the show’s most dramatic backstories: a hurricane off Louisiana that wrecks an offshore rig and sparks a $420 million insurance fight.

At the same time, news headlines in late 2024 and early 2025 featured a real Hurricane Francine in the Gulf of Mexico. That overlap has led to a steady fan question: is the storm behind M‑Tex’s offshore disaster based on the real Francine, and did that 2024 hurricane actually destroy Gulf rigs the way the show suggests?

To answer that, it helps to separate three things: what the real hurricane did, what regulators and companies actually reported about offshore damage, and how Landman uses a fictional hurricane to drive its plot.

Is Hurricane Francine a Real Storm?

Yes. Hurricane Francine is not just a TV invention. It was the sixth named storm and fourth hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.

According to the National Weather Service, Francine formed in the Bay of Campeche on September 9, 2024, from a tropical wave that had crossed the Atlantic and Caribbean. It took advantage of very warm Gulf waters and strengthened quickly.

By the evening of September 10, Francine reached Category 1 strength. The next afternoon, on September 11, it intensified into a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds around 100–105 mph and a central pressure near 972 millibars.

Francine made landfall around 5 p.m. CDT on September 11, 2024, in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, roughly 30 miles south‑southwest of Morgan City. It then pushed inland across Louisiana, Mississippi, and toward the Tennessee Valley, weakening to a tropical storm and then a post‑tropical system over the following days.

Preliminary national climate tallies put direct U.S. damage at about $1.3 billion, largely from wind and flooding in Louisiana and Mississippi. AccuWeather’s broader estimate, which includes business disruption and energy impacts, pegs the total economic loss around $9 billion. Despite that, official records list no confirmed deaths from the storm.

Crucially, Francine was not destructive enough overall to have its name retired. In April 2025, the World Meteorological Organization retired Beryl, Helene, and Milton from the 2024 list for their much higher death tolls and damage. Francine stayed on the list, meaning the name can return in future seasons.

What Hurricane Francine Did to Gulf Oil and Gas

Francine’s most visible national impact came offshore, where it interrupted a large share of U.S. oil and gas production without tearing the hardware apart.

The Gulf of Mexico typically supplies about 15% of U.S. crude oil and around 2% of its natural gas. When a sizable hurricane threatens, offshore operators follow a well‑rehearsed script: evacuate people, shut in wells, and move vulnerable rigs away from the storm.

The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) documented that process in detail during Francine:

• By September 10, crews had left 130 manned production platforms, about 35% of the 371 staffed platforms in federal Gulf waters. Two non‑dynamically positioned (non‑DP) drilling rigs were evacuated, and three DP rigs moved off location. Around 23.6% of oil and about 25–26% of gas production were shut in.
• On September 11, as Francine neared landfall, evacuations peaked. Operators had cleared 171 platforms, or roughly 46% of the manned total, along with 3 non‑DP rigs and 4 DP rigs. About 38–39% of offshore oil and roughly 49% of gas output were offline.
• On September 12, BSEE estimated that 41.7% of Gulf oil and 53.3% of gas production were shut in, with 169 platforms still evacuated.

Those figures translated into hundreds of thousands of barrels per day temporarily off the market. Industry and federal tallies over the week around Francine’s landfall suggest cumulative losses on the order of 1.8 to 2.4 million barrels of crude and roughly 4–5 billion cubic feet of natural gas, depending on the cutoff date used.

BSEE described shut‑ins as “standard procedure” during evacuations, noting that operators close subsea safety valves to prevent any release of oil or gas. In other words, this is how the system is supposed to respond when a storm approaches.

By September 14, recovery was under way. Nearly 30% of oil and 41% of gas production remained offline. By September 16, that had fallen to about 12% of oil and 16% of gas, with just 24 platforms still unmanned. A later final update cut those remaining shut‑ins again, to roughly 5.6% of oil and 9.7% of gas, with only 16 platforms evacuated.

Major companies gave similar accounts. ExxonMobil reported that it evacuated all personnel from the Hoover offshore platform and shut in operations there, while also monitoring its refineries and chemical plants in Louisiana. The company later stated there was “no significant damage or flooding” at its Baton Rouge complex.

Onshore logistics came back quickly as well. Louisiana ports reported no major damage and resumed normal operations after standard post‑storm inspections.

Did Hurricane Francine Destroy Any Offshore Rigs?

This is where the gap between perception and paperwork shows up.

For earlier catastrophic hurricanes, federal agencies explicitly documented destroyed platforms and rigs in the Gulf:

• Hurricane Betsy (1965) destroyed eight offshore platforms. A Shell platform and Zapata’s Maverick rig “were not seen again” after the storm.
• Hurricane Andrew (1992) damaged 241 oil and gas structures and toppled 33 platforms off Louisiana. About 83 pipeline segments were damaged. Industry estimated around $500 million in offshore facility losses, alongside an immediate one‑third cut to Gulf oil production.
• Hurricane Katrina (2005) was linked to the destruction of roughly 44 offshore platforms, even before Hurricane Rita hit a few weeks later.
• Hurricane Rita (2005) destroyed 66 platforms and four drilling rigs, and severely damaged another 32 platforms and 10 rigs, halting essentially all Gulf oil production and around 80% of its gas output.
• Following Hurricanes Gustav and Ike (2008), final federal assessments counted 60 platforms destroyed and 31 with extensive damage, representing about 234 million barrels of oil equivalent in reserves and more than 1% of Gulf daily production.

Those counts appear in Minerals Management Service (now BSEE) reports, industry surveys, and later academic work. They show that, when platforms or rigs are physically destroyed, the losses are carefully tallied and publicly reported.

For Hurricane Francine, no similar destruction tallies exist.

BSEE’s Francine updates focus on evacuations, shut‑in volumes, and the step‑by‑step return to service. They explain that “production from undamaged facilities will be brought back online immediately,” and that any damaged facilities may take longer after inspections. However, they do not identify specific platforms or rigs as destroyed.

Industry coverage reinforces that picture. Oil and Gas Journal reported that platforms and floating installations such as Who Dat, Big Foot, Jack/St. Malo, Anchor, and Tahiti shut in or operated at reduced rates, in part because of downstream issues at onshore plants and pipelines. Early inspections found no significant damage to those offshore facilities.

CleanTechnica, in a piece contrasting fossil and renewable infrastructure, described Francine as knocking more than 40% of offshore oil and over half of gas production offline for a time. Yet even that critical account did not claim that the storm tore platforms from their legs.

Taken together, the record describes Francine as operationally disruptive but not structurally catastrophic offshore. It temporarily sidelined a large slice of production but did not generate a documented wave of destroyed rigs or platforms like Katrina, Rita, or Ike.

The Hurricane Disaster Inside Landman

Landman uses a hurricane in a different way: as the fuse for a sprawling insurance and corporate power struggle.

In the show’s backstory, M‑Tex Oil suffers a major offshore accident “after a rig was damaged by a hurricane off the coast of Louisiana.” An offshore gas well then blows out, wiping out production from that field.

M‑Tex carries coverage with a fictional insurer called Blanton. Instead of reimbursing actual repair and drilling costs, Blanton pays M‑Tex a $420 million lump‑sum settlement tied to a specific condition: the company must drill a replacement offshore well to restore the lost production.

That clause becomes central in Season 2. As explained in a detailed Landman.tv breakdown, M‑Tex never drills the required replacement well and uses the money elsewhere. Attorney Rebecca Falcone frames that as both a contract breach and a form of insurance fraud, arguing that Blanton effectively overpaid on a claim that was never fulfilled.

Landman.tv notes that the $420 million figure sits near the high end of real‑world offshore insurance limits. Senate testimony and industry data cited in that explainer describe many large operators carrying $300–$500 million of “operator extra expense” coverage, with global offshore property premiums totaling about $3–3.5 billion annually and third‑party liability capacity around $500 million. In other words, the size of the fictional settlement is aggressive but not absurd.

Within the story, M‑Tex is also a valuable client. Rebecca threatens to pull roughly $14 million per year in insurance premiums from Blanton if the company does not treat M‑Tex favorably. That helps explain why the insurer paid the full amount up front.

The hurricane fallout sits alongside other big‑ticket deals in the series. In another major storyline, Tommy Norris’s son Cooper signs a $48 million drilling contract with the cartel‑linked Sonrisa Oil Company for six West Texas wells, further raising the family’s financial risk.

However, one detail is important for fans trying to match fiction to reality: nowhere in official synopses, recaps, or the Landman.tv analysis is this hurricane named “Francine.” It is always described simply as a hurricane off Louisiana that damages a rig and triggers a blowout.

Could Landman Be Secretly Depicting Hurricane Francine?

The production timeline makes a direct link very unlikely.

Paramount+ ordered Landman in 2022. Filming for Season 1 ran from February to June 2024, mostly in Texas. That is several months before the real Hurricane Francine even formed in the Gulf in September 2024.

The series then premiered on November 17, 2024, after the storm. Season 2 began filming in spring 2025 and debuted in November 2025, with the M‑Tex insurance battle in full view.

Because the fictional hurricane disaster already sat in the show’s backstory during Season 1, creators had to have written and shot those elements before any forecaster named or tracked the real Francine. There is no public indication that the writers later went back to re‑label the storm to match events.

There is also a mismatch in scale. The Landman hurricane destroys a rig and leads to a total blowout, requiring an entirely new replacement well. By contrast, available federal and industry records describe the real Francine as a storm that:

• Temporarily shut in up to about 42% of Gulf oil and 53% of gas production,
• Prompted large‑scale evacuations of platforms and rigs, and
• Did not produce a known tally of destroyed offshore structures.

So while both stories involve a hurricane near offshore Louisiana, they do not match on timing, impact, or documentation.

Why Fans Still Connect the Two

Despite those differences, the confusion is understandable.

The real Francine arrived in the same general region that Landman uses as the setting for M‑Tex’s offshore loss. Both involve Gulf hurricanes, Louisiana waters, and high‑stakes consequences for the energy industry.

Francine also hit only a few months before Landman premiered, so viewers were already familiar with the name when they heard about a hurricane‑damaged rig in the show. It is natural for fans to look for one‑to‑one inspirations in a series that prides itself on gritty realism.

Co‑creator Christian Wallace has said the show draws on real incidents like blowouts, refinery accidents, and hurricane damage, while using fictional companies such as M‑Tex to avoid implicating actual operators. In that sense, the hurricane storyline is rooted in real types of disasters, just not in one specific named storm.

The destroyed platforms from Betsy, Andrew, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike provide ample real‑world examples of what a worst‑case offshore hurricane loss looks like. The show compresses those historical kinds of losses into a single, dramatic event for M‑Tex.

What Hurricane Francine Shows About Real Oilfield Risk

From an energy‑market perspective, Francine looked a lot like the kind of “high‑impact” season that federal analysts model.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that bad hurricane years can produce temporary losses of roughly 1.5 million barrels per day of offshore crude and cause retail gasoline prices to jump by 25–30 cents per gallon for a time. Francine’s peak shut‑in share of about 40–42% of Gulf oil and more than half of its gas output fits that disruptive profile.

Yet the absence of confirmed platform destruction underscores another point. Improved design standards, better storm tracking, and more robust evacuation practices have helped reduce the frequency of catastrophic hardware losses, even when storms still knock out power and halt production.

For coastal communities, the bigger lasting scars from Francine came on land: flooded homes, damaged businesses, and nearly 400,000 to 450,000 customers without power at the peak in Louisiana, plus tens of thousands more in Mississippi and Alabama.

For offshore operators, the storm served as a real‑world stress test of shutdown and restart procedures rather than a repeat of 2005‑style destruction.

What Happens Next

Looking ahead, the name Francine will remain on future Atlantic hurricane lists, unlike Beryl, Helene, and Milton, which the World Meteorological Organization retired in 2025 because of their far higher death and damage tolls.

In television, Landman has been renewed for a third season as of December 2025, and there is every sign that Taylor Sheridan’s team will keep blending real‑world oilfield risks with fictional companies and catastrophes.

For fans, the takeaway is straightforward:

• Yes, Hurricane Francine was a real 2024 storm that disrupted nearly half of Gulf oil and gas output for several days.
• No, current federal and industry records do not show it destroying offshore rigs or platforms the way Landman portrays.
• And no, there is solid evidence that the show’s hurricane disaster is not a direct retelling of Francine, given the production timeline and the lack of any “Francine” name on screen.

Instead, Landman borrows from a broader history of Gulf hurricanes and platform losses, then amplifies those risks into a single, high‑stakes insurance showdown for M‑Tex and the Norris family.