When I was a child, all of the hurricanes in my part of the world (the coast of the Gulf of Mexico) were given female names. One powerful hurricane whose eye passed over the city where I was living (Corpus Christi, Texas) inspired Lightning Hopkins's blues song "Hurricanes Carla and Esther," which identifies the hurricane itself as Carla and an associated tornado as "a twister named Esther." In the song, Hopkins repeatedly refers to each storm as "she." Most of the people I knew in coastal Texas back then referred to a hurricane as "it," but some, taking their cue from the storm's female name, called it "she." I don't remember anyone calling any hurricane in those days "he."
The National Hurricane Center has a very informative page dedicated to the history of hurricane names. Here are three paragraphs from it:
For several hundred years many hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the particular saint's day on which the hurricane occurred. Ivan R. Tannehill describes in his book "Hurricanes" the major tropical storms of recorded history and mentions many hurricanes named after saints. For example, there was "Hurricane Santa Ana" which struck Puerto Rico with exceptional violence on July 26, 1825, and "San Felipe" (the first) and "San Felipe" (the second) which hit Puerto Rico on September 13 in both 1876 and 1928.
...
In 1953, the United States abandoned a confusing two-year old plan to name storms by a phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie) when a new, international phonetic alphabet was introduced. That year, the United States began using female names for storms.
The practice of naming hurricanes solely after women came to an end in 1978 when men's and women's names were included in the Eastern North Pacific storm lists. In 1979, male and female names were included in lists for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
The upshot of this fragment of history is that anyone who wants to argue that in English female gender is generally ascribed to beneficial things and male gender to potentially harmful things will have to account for the rather glaring counterexample of hurricane names from the period 1953–1979. Other weather and geologic events seem to get the "she" treatment as well.
From "A Square Peg," in Ainslee's, volume 33 (1914) [combined snippets]:
On the horizon a thin streak of white showed against the black of sky and sullen sea, and the distant roar of the coming storm swelled loud.
"Lay down from aloft there as soon as you can, men,'' Dave called out, "or she'll flatten ye against that riggin' so ye can't get down."
From Harry Kroll, Waters Over the Dam (1944):
The clouds were rising higher, and the heat was oppressive. My flesh was like leather and my bones like sticks. Usually I did not mind the work. This afternoon I just could not, some how, force myself. The mules were that way too. "She's fixing to rain tadpoles and wild catfish, Jeems!" I said once to the big black man.
From Edna and Carol Were Tough "Gals"," in Telephony, volume 147 (1954) [combined snippets]:
Neither was a lady. They were rough, tough girls. They were spawned—Carol and Edna—in the tropics. Once they were soft warm breezes, gently revolving. Then, like Cyclops, each grew a single clear blue "eye." Around this eye began to whirls, counter clock-wise, a ragged skirt of roaring wind, torrential rain and ocean spray.
Hurricanes are ugly cousins of those land-based monsters, the cyclone and the tornado. They are sisters of the Pacific typhoon. ...
She howled into Cape Cod and the New England mainland. She filled the streets of historic Providence with dirty tidal water. In Boston, she knocked down the tower of the North Church immortalized by the ride of Paul Revere.
From Ellen Rene, Investigating Volcanic Eruptions (2008):
She's Going to Blow!
When pressures inside magma chambers get too great, magma shoots out. Like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, it pushes through cracks to the surface.
From Barbara Freethy, Ryan's Return (2012):
"The river may be the main event. It's washing over Tucker's Bridge."
"But that bridge is low."
"We checked the high points, too. She's riding high, a couple more inches every hour."
"What are you saying?"
"I think she's going to flood."
From Michael Hodjera, The Komodo Cafe (2013):
"What is it? What's happening?"
"It's the volcano," said Chloe. From the feel of it, she's fixing to blow!"
So it appears that there is some sort of tradition in U.S. English of referring to major, powerful meteorological and geological events as "she." I don't think that any comparable tradition supports referring to such events as "he."
she
is commonly used for motorcycles in the biker subculture.