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Spending his life in Los Angeles, Morgan Andersen knows natural disasters all too well. In middle school, an earthquake shook her house. His grandfather was affected by recent forest fires in neighboring Orange County.
“It’s just that constant reminder, ‘Oh yeah, we live somewhere where there are natural disasters and they can strike anytime,’ said the 29-year-old marketing manager.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency calculated the risk for each county in America for 18 types of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, volcanoes, and even tsunamis. And of more than 3,000 counties, Los Angeles County is ranked highest on the National Risk Index..
The way FEMA calculates the index of spotlight locations long known as Dangerous Points, like Los Angeles, but some of the other highlighted locations go against what most people would think. For example, eastern cities like New York and Philadelphia are much more at risk for tornadoes than the mainstays of tornado alleys in Oklahoma and Kansas.
And the county with the greatest risk of coastal flooding is Washington state which is not on the ocean, although its river is tidal.
These apparent quirks occur because the FEMA index assesses the frequency of disasters, the number of people and the amount of assets at risk, the social vulnerability of the population, and the region’s ability to bounce back. And that translates into a high risk assessment for big cities with lots of poor and expensive properties that are ill-prepared to be hit by disasters that only happen once in a generation.
While the rankings may seem “counterintuitive,” the degree of risk is not just how often a type of natural disaster strikes a place, but the severity of the toll, according to FEMA’s Mike Grimm.
Take the tornadoes. Two counties in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Hudson County, New Jersey, are FEMA’s five most risky counties for tornadoes. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – with over 120 tornadoes since 1950, including one that killed 36 people in 1999 – ranks 120th.
“They (the first five) are a low frequency event, potentially high consequence, because there is a lot of exposure to the properties in this area,” said the Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. . Director Susan Cutter, whose work is based on much of FEMA’s calculations. “Therefore, a small tornado can create a significant loss in dollars.”
In New York City, people are much less aware of the risk and less prepared – and that’s a problem, Grimm said. The day before he said this, New York had a tornado watch. A few days later, the National Weather Service tweeted than in 2020, several cities, mostly along the East Coast, had more tornadoes than Wichita, Kansas.
In general, Oklahoma is twice as likely to have tornadoes as New York, but the potential for damage is much higher in New York because there are 20 times as many people and almost 20 times the value of the property at risk, FEMA officials said.
“It’s that perception of the risk that it won’t happen to me,” Grimm said. “Just because I haven’t seen him in my life doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.”
This type of denial is especially true with frequent and costly flooding, he said, and this is why only 4% of the population has federal flood insurance while about a third. need.
Disaster experts say people need to think about the great disaster that only happens a few times at most, but is devastating when it does – Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the super outbreak of tornadoes of 2011, the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco or a pandemic.
“We don’t take risks that rarely happen,” said David Ropeik, retired Harvard professor of risk communication and author of “How Risky Is It, Really?” “We just don’t fear them as much as we fear things that are more present in our consciousness, more common. It is practically 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.
FEMA’s 10 Risky Places, in addition to Los Angeles, are three New York area counties – Bronx, New York County (Manhattan) and Kings County (Brooklyn) – as well as Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, St .Louis and Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in California.
According to FEMA, Loudoun County, an outer suburb of Washington, DC, has the lowest risk of any country. Three other suburban Washington counties rank among the lowest risk for large counties, along with the Boston suburbs, Long Island, the Detroit suburbs and Pittsburgh.
Some FEMA risk rankings by type of disaster seem obvious. Miami has the highest risk of hurricanes, lightning strikes, and river flooding. Hawaii County is at the peak of volcanic risk, and Honolulu County for tsunamis, Dallas for hail, Philadelphia for heat waves, and Riverside County in California for wildfires.
Outside risk expert Himanshu Grover at the University of Washington called FEMA’s effort “a good tool, a good start,” but with flaws, such as final scores that seem to minimize the frequency of disasters.
Risks are changing due to climate change and this index does not appear to address that, Ropeik said. FEMA officials said climate change appears in the flood calculations and will likely be incorporated in future updates.
This new tool, based on the calculations of 80 experts over six years, aims to “educate landlords, tenants and communities to be more resilient,” FEMA’s Grimm said, adding that people shouldn’t come in or out. of a county because of the risk. Evaluation.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears
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The Associated Press’s Department of Health and Science receives support from the Department of Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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