Morgan Andersen has spent her life in Los Angeles and knows natural disasters all too well. At university, an earthquake shook her home hard. Her grandfather was hit by recent wildfires in neighboring Orange County.
“It’s just the constant reminder: ‘Oh yeah, we live somewhere where there are natural disasters and they can strike at any time,'” the 29-year-old marketing manager said.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency has calculated the risk for each country in America for 18 types of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, volcanoes and even tsunamis. And of the more than 3,000 counties, Los Angeles County has the highest ranking in the National Risk Index.
The way FEMA calculates the index spotlights places places that have long been known as danger spots, like Los Angeles, but some other highlighted spots are at odds with what most people would think. Eastern cities like New York and Philadelphia, for example, are at much higher risk of tornadoes than the tornado trail in Oklahoma and Kansas.
And the province with the greatest coastal flood risk is one in the state of Washington that is not at sea, even though the river is tidal.
The apparent oddities occur because FEMA’s index scores how often disasters strike, how many people and how much property is damaged, how vulnerable the population is socially and how well the area can bounce back. And this leads to a high risk assessment for large cities with very poor people and expensive property that is ill-prepared to be hit by one-time disasters.
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Although the rankings seem “counter-intuitive”, the degree of risk is not just how often a type of natural disaster hits a place, but how bad the toll would be, according to Mike Grimm of FEMA.
Take tornadoes. Two provinces in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Hudson County, New Jersey, are the top five provinces for FEMA tornadoes. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – with more than 120 tornadoes since 1950, including one that killed 36 people in 1999 – ranks 120th.
“They (the top five) are an event with a low frequency and a potential consequence because there is a lot of exposure to property in the area,” said Susan Cutter, director of the University’s Institute for Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. South Carolina, said. is based on. “Therefore, a small tornado can cause a large dollar loss.”
In New York, people are much less aware of the risk and are less prepared – and that’s a problem, Grimm said. The day before he said that, New York had a tornado clock. Days later, the National Weather Service tweeted that by 2020 several cities, mostly along the East Coast, had more tornadoes than Wichita, Kansas.
In general, Oklahoma has twice as much chance of getting tornadoes as New York City, but the damage potential is much higher in New York because there are 20 times more people and nearly 20 times the property value is at risk, FEMA said. officials said.
“It’s the risk perception that it will not happen to me,” Grimm said. “Just because I’ve not seen it in my lifetime, does not mean it will happen.”
That kind of denial is especially true with frequent and costly floods, he said, and that’s why only 4% of the population has federal flood insurance when about one-third needs it.
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Disaster experts say people should think about the great catastrophe that occurs at most a few times in a lifetime, but is devastating when it hits – Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the super tornado tornado in 2011, the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 or ‘ a pandemic.
“We’re bad at taking risks that only rarely happen seriously,” said David Ropeik, a retired Harvard lecturer in risk communication and author of “How Risky Is It Really?” “We simply do not fear them as much as we are afraid of things that are more common in our consciousness. It is virtually disastrous with natural disasters.”
Something like FEMA’s new index “opens our eyes to the gaps between what we feel and what is,” Ropeik said.
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FEMA’s top 10 most dangerous places, in addition to Los Angeles, are three counties in the New York City area – Bronx, New York County (Manhattan) and Kings County (Brooklyn) – along with Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, St. Louis and Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California.
According to the same measurement, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, DC, has the lowest risk of any country, according to FEMA. Three other suburban provinces in Washington count among the lowest risks for larger provinces, along with suburbs Boston, Long Island, suburbs Detroit and Pittsburgh.
Some of FEMA’s risk rankings by disaster type seem obvious. Miami has the greatest risk of hurricanes, lightning and flooding in the river. Hawaii County is a peak in volcano risk and Honolulu County for tsunamis, Dallas for hail, Philadelphia for heat waves and Riverside County in California for wildfires.
Risk expert Himanshu Grover at the University of Washington called FEMA’s effort “a good tool, a good start”, but one with errors, such as final scores that look like disaster frequency.
The risks are changing due to climate change and this index does not seem to be addressing it, Ropeik said. FEMA officials said climate change appears in flood calculations and is likely to be included in future updates.
This new tool, based on calculations by 80 experts over six years, is about ‘educating homeowners and tenants and communities to be more resilient’, FEMA’s Grimm said, adding that due to a risk people do not go to a country should not move. grading.