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Where Nature Is Deadliest in the U.S.
Dec. 16, 2008 -- The South, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, leads the nation in its natural disaster death rate, a new study shows.
The study maps deaths from natural hazards -- including heat waves, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods -- around the U.S. from 1970 to 2004.
Regionally, the South had the highest death rate from natural hazards. A county-by-county look shows that coastal areas of the South were particularly hard hit. Arkansas, southwestern Texas, the northern Plains, the West's mountains, and the lower Mississippi River area also had high death rates.
Of all the natural hazards studied, heat/drought had the highest death rate, report Kevin Borden, MS, and Susan Cutter, PhD, of the geography department at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
"What is noteworthy here is that over time, highly destructive, highly publicized, often catastrophic singular events such as hurricanes and earthquakes are responsible for relatively few deaths when compared to more frequent, less catastrophic events such as heat waves, and severe weather (summer or winter)," write Borden and Cutter.
"An important question is whether people in areas of high mortality know what to do (or what not to do) when a hazard event occurs," Borden and Cutter also note.
The findings appear online in the International Journal of Health Geographics.
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