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Places in the U.S. Where Disaster Strikes Again and Again
- awat 8y agoI’d be interested to know if anyone living in these areas has had trouble with insurance rates over this period. I realize many people aren’t fans of insurance but some of these areas seem quantifiably troublesome to live in short term.
- bassman9000 8y agohttps://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program There's no incentive to move when FEMA can provide tax-subsidized "insurance".
- awat 8y agoWow, I didnt even know this existed.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIt's slowly being fixed. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/29/as-congress-stalls-trump-quietly-overhauls-flood-program-491384 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/29/as-congress-stalls...
- bassman9000 8y agoI see a lot of noise, and no change. But beyond forgiving the debt, Congress has been unwilling to enact additional changes.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago...which is why the Trump administration is bypassing congress using executive branch admin powers, which is the first paragraph in the link I posted.
- bassman9000 8y agohttps://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-approves-kentucky-disaster-declaration-2/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-do... http://cullmantoday.com/2018/04/28/president-trump-approves-fema-assistance-for-cullman-hailstorm-damage/ http://cullmantoday.com/2018/04/28/president-trump-approves-... https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-approves-north-carolina-disaster-declaration/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-do... Assistance can include grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses, and other programs to help individuals and business owners recover from the effects of the disaster. Would be nice to see some info on that overhaul.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWill return when I have more information. I am active in the public policy space outside of my day gig, and flood insurance is an issue near and dear to my heart with regards to wasteful federal spending.
- stevenwoo 8y agoI had a relative who's home flooded during Harvey, used the Federal flood insurance to rebuild and this year renewed insurance at the same rate. Flood insurance is out of whack with normal insurance practices.
- jrs235 8y ago>Flood insurance is out of whack Yup. National flood insurance causes malinvestment.
- justherefortart 8y agoI live in the OKC area, no issues. My father and brother's houses 6+ miles apart. Were destroyed by the same tornado in 2010. Neither had any insurance issues at all (fortunately, didn't happen for everyone). Tornadoes while scary don't typically cause enormous areas of disaster on the scale of a major earthquake or hurricane. Flooding causes more issues as well.
- peckrob 8y agoI live in one of these areas (Huntsville, Ala., the red blob at the top of Alabama). Here, it's tornadoes. But the thing about tornadoes is that they are incredibly localized. While the big mile-wide wedge tornadoes are can destroy a lot of property, most tornadoes are small - a few dozen to a maybe a hundred yards wide. And even the big ones affect, relatively speaking, a small area. A tornado could destroy your neighbor's house and leave yours almost totally undamaged. The real danger is when you have an outbreak of a bunch of tornadoes hitting the same area. Even then, though, any individual person's chance of being impacted are pretty low. That said, I haven't had any problems getting insurance. Although, after the 2011 Super Outbreak [0] my insurance went up about 20%. Which sounds like a lot but was about $200 a year increase or $17 a month. Hardly breaking the bank for me, but I can understand how it might for some. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak
- madengr 8y agoThe graph scale needs to be increased an order of magnitude, as $5M in losses is nothing. Wait until the Big One hits Sanfrancisco; you ain’t seen nuthin.
- frockington 8y agoGood thing they've been frugal and have been cutting spending in order to be prepared for the next big one /s
- protomyth 8y agoHold up, the title is "The Places in the U.S. Where Disaster Strikes Again and Again" but the first map they show is "Losses in each ZIP code from major natural disasters, 2002-17" in 2017 USD. This is really misleading because the a zip code could have one disaster and show up on the map. It would seem a different type of map that actually shows "again and again" would be much more appropriate.
- tgb 8y agoAnd since it's based on value, this is highly related to the number of people living there. There could be a perpetually-erupting volcano where no one lives and it wouldn't show up at all.
- WkndTriathlete 8y agoThat's addressed in the actual article to a small extent, but there is value in looking at both sets of data (total and per capita).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pc2g4d 8y agoOregon, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada seem like the place to be
- framebit 8y agoNot exactly. This maps shows insurance claims related to natural disasters, not incidence of natural disasters. Big states out west have very low population density as compared to spots east of the Mississippi. If a raging forest fire or severe storm happens on a big stretch of BLM land in Nevada, nobody's going to make an insurance claim about it.
- bsharitt 8y agoThat was my impression as well. While hurricane prone areas are highlighted well, once you move out of those areas, the map seems to start correlating to population to a large degree. Granted there are some cities missing and and some rural areas as red spots.
- cirgue 8y agoCharlotte and Raleigh are conspicuously absent.
- desdiv 8y agoExactly. Property losses correlates with population density. Related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- slededit 8y agoIf nature happens and nothing gets damaged is it really a "disaster"?
- sdhgaiojfsa 8y agoThat was not my takeaway. My takeaway was that these are places where no one is, and thus there is not a significant amount of damage.
- danbruc 8y agoRelevant xkcd [1]. The map would be quite a bit more informative if it was normalized by the value of all assets in each region. Population density could probably be used as a first approximation if such information is not [easily] available. [1] https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- curun1r 8y agoOne the one hand, yes. On the other hand, you don't need to normalize anything to see that we should probably stop classifying hurricanes as "natural disasters" and start calling them something that indicates what they really are...totally-expected extreme weather patterns.
- danbruc 8y agoIt's not about what you want to call them, it's about producing a meaningful map. If you want to show where disasters regularly occur and you want to use the costs of the damages as a proxy, then you have to normalize it, otherwise you may just produce a map of the value of assets.
- lamename 8y agoSummarized in 1 map: https://www.datafoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/disaster_map_blog-592x304.png https://www.datafoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/disas...
- joncrane 8y agoGot a higher res version?
- 0wnt_U_B 8y agoMove to Utah. All there is to learn.
- pdelbarba 8y agoThat's possibly the dumbest chart I've ever seen. Since when are nuclear plants disaster locations? Might as well label the entire US at risk of "falling airplanes" or every city as "ICBM target". In going to assume this just an ad for the labeled data center which is right in the middle of a drought prone area. Can't run a data center when there are no employees and no water but I see that droughts and wild fires are conveniently omitted...
- framebit 8y agoNot to mention that 100mi inland doesn't have nearly the same risk for dangerous hurricane effects as 1 - 10mi inland, and what about forest fires, and what about icy roads, etc, etc.
- maxerickson 8y agoIn places where winter weather is normally cold and snowy, big storms aren't really disasters. It's necessary to plan for them but it's very unusual where just being in a location during one exposes people to a lot of danger.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
- nsporillo 8y agoThese findings are consistent with another NYT article posted almost a year ago. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/29/climate/southern-states-worse-climate-effects.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/29/climate/south...
- RickJWagner 8y agoThey missed the biggest one of all: Washington, DC.
- shkkmo 8y agohttps://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ That heat map doesn't look particularly useful, the numbers need to be weighed per capita at least to be meaningful.