By Seth Borenstein
Spending his life in Los Angeles, Morgan Andersen knows natural disasters very well. In college, an earthquake rocked his home heavily. Your grandfather was affected by recent forest fires in neighboring Orange County.
“It’s just that constant reminder: ‘Ah, yes, we live somewhere where there are natural disasters and they can strike at any time,'” said the 29-year-old marketing executive.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has 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 the more than 3,000 counties, Los Angeles County has the highest rating on the National Risk Index.
The way FEMA calculates local index spotlights that have long been known as danger points, like Los Angeles, but some other highlighted locations go against what most people would think. For example, cities in the east, such as New York and Philadelphia, rank much more at the risk of tornadoes than the tough ones in Oklahoma and Kansas.
And the county with the highest risk of coastal flooding is the one in Washington State that is not in the ocean, even though its river is at tides.
These apparent oddities occur because the FEMA index scores how often disasters happen, how many people and how much property is in danger, how vulnerable the population is socially and how well the area is able to recover. And this results in a high risk assessment for large cities with a lot of poor people and expensive properties that are poorly prepared to be hit by disasters that occur once every generation.
While ratings may seem “counter-intuitive,” the degree of risk is not just how often a type of natural disaster hits a location, but how bad the price would be, according to Mike Grimm of FEMA.
See the tornadoes. Two counties in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Hudson County, New Jersey, are FEMA’s five highest-risk tornado counties. 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 low-frequency events and have potentially high consequences because there is a lot of property exposure in this area,” said Susan Cutter, director of the University of South Carolina’s Hazard and Vulnerability Research Institute, whose work is a large part of the FEMA calculations are based on. “Therefore, a small tornado can create a huge loss of dollars.”
In New York, people are much less aware of the risk and less prepared – and that’s a problem, said Grimm. The day before, he said that, New York had a tornado watch. Days later, the National Weather Service tweeted that in 2020 several cities, mainly along the East Coast, had more tornadoes than Wichita, Kansas.
In general, Oklahoma is twice as likely to experience tornadoes as New York, but the potential for damage is much greater 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 risk perception that this is not going to happen to me,” said Grimm. “Just because I haven’t seen it in my life, it doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
This type of denial is especially true with frequent and expensive flooding, he said, and is the reason why only 4% of the population has federal flood insurance, when about a third may need it.
Disaster experts say people need to think about the big disaster that happens only a few times in life, but it’s devastating when it hits – Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the 2011 super tornado outbreak, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or a pandemic.
“We are bad at taking serious risks that rarely happen,” said David Ropeik, a retired Harvard risk communications lecturer and author of “How Risky Is It, Really?” “We just don’t fear them as much as we fear the things that are most present in our consciousness, most common. This is practically disastrous with natural disasters. “
Something like the new FEMA index “opens our eyes to the gaps between what we feel and what it is,” said Ropeik.
FEMA’s 10 riskiest 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.
By the same token, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, DC, has the lowest risk of all counties, according to FEMA. Three other suburban counties in Washington are among the lowest risks for larger counties, along with the suburbs of Boston, Long Island, suburb of Detroit and Pittsburgh.
Some of FEMA’s risk classifications by type of disaster seem obvious. Miami presents the greatest risk of hurricanes, lightning and river flooding. Hawaii County is the largest at risk for volcanoes and Honolulu County for tsunamis, Dallas for hail, Philadelphia for heat waves and Riverside County in California for forest fires.
External risk expert Himanshu Grover of the University of Washington called the FEMA effort “a good tool, a good start,” but with flaws, like final scores that seem to minimize the frequency of disasters.
Risks are changing due to climate change and this index does not seem to address that, said Ropeik. FEMA officials said climate change appears in flood calculations and is likely to be incorporated into future updates.
This new tool, based on calculations by 80 experts over six years, aims to “educate landlords and tenants and communities to be more resilient,” said FEMA’s Grimm, adding that people should not move in or out. county due to risk Assessment.
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.