Morgan Andersen spends her life in Los Angeles facing natural disasters all too well. In college, an earthquake shook her house hard. Her grandfather has been hit by recent wildfires in neighboring Orange County.
“It’s just that constant reminder, ‘Oh yes, we live somewhere where there are natural disasters and they can strike at any time,’” said the 29-year-old marketing manager.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has calculated the risk for every province 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 ranks highest in the National Risk Index.
The way FEMA calculates the index highlights places that have long been known as dangerous places, such as Los Angeles, but some of the other marked places go against what most people would think. For example, eastern cities like New York and Philadelphia score much higher on tornado risk than Oklahoma and Kansas tornado alleys.
And the county most at risk for coastal flooding is one in Washington State, which is not oceanfront, even though the river is tidal.
Those seeming idiosyncrasies occur because the FEMA index scores how often disasters strike, how many people and how many properties are at risk, how vulnerable the population is socially, and how well the area is able to recover. And that results in a risk assessment for large cities with many poor people and expensive properties ill-prepared to be hit by disasters that only occur once per 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 how bad the toll would be, according to FEMA’s Mike Grimm.
Take tornadoes. Two counties in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Hudson County, New Jersey, are FEMA’s five most at risk counties for 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 a low-frequency, potentially high-impact event because there is a lot of real estate exposed in that area,” said the University of South Carolina Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute. Director Susan Cutter, on whose work many of the FEMA calculations are based. “That’s why a small tornado can cause a big dollar loss.”
In New York, people are much less aware of the risk and less prepared – and that’s a problem, Grimm said. The day before he said that, New York had a tornado watch. Days later, the National Weather Service tweeted that in 2020 several cities, mostly along the East Coast, had more tornadoes than Wichita, Kansas.
Overall, Oklahoma is twice as likely to get tornadoes as New York City, but the damage potential is much greater in New York because there are 20 times as many people and nearly 20 times the property value at risk, FEMA officials said.
“It’s that risk perception that it won’t happen to me,” said Grimm. “Just because I haven’t seen it in my life doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
That kind of denial is especially true with frequent and costly floods, he said, and is the reason that only 4% of the population has federal flood insurance, while about a third may need it.
Disaster experts say people should think about the great disaster that happens a few times a lifetime at most, but is devastating when it hits – Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the super outbreak of tornadoes in 2011, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or a pandemic.
“We are bad at taking risks that rarely occur,” said David Ropeik, a retired Harvard risk communications professor and author of “How Risky Is It, Really?” “We just don’t fear them as much as things that are more present in our consciousness, are more common. That is practically disastrous in natural disasters. “
Something like FEMA’s new index “opens our eyes to the gap between what we feel and what is,” said Ropeik.
FEMA’s top 10 riskiest places, besides 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, California.
By the same measurement, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, DC, has the lowest risk of any county, according to FEMA. Three other Washington suburban counties are among the lowest risk for larger counties, along with Boston, Long Island, suburban Detroit, and Pittsburgh.
Some of FEMA’s risk classifications by type of disaster seem obvious. Miami has the greatest risk of hurricanes, lightning strikes and river flooding. Hawaii County is top in volcano risk and Honolulu County for tsunamis, Dallas for hail, Philadelphia for heat waves, and California’s Riverside County for wildfires.
External risk expert Himanshu Grover at the University of Washington called FEMA’s effort “a good tool, a good start,” but one with flaws, such as final scores that seem to downplay the frequency of disasters.
Risks change due to climate change, and this index doesn’t seem to address that, Ropeik said. FEMA officials said climate change is showing 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, ” said FEMA’s Grimm, adding that people should not move to or from a county because of the risk. review.
___
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears
___
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.