Quakes, wildfires, flash floods, mudslides, and now Storm Watch 2008. Amid all the local media hype that invariably goes with natural hazards like these, you’d think Southern California was the nation’s most dangerous place to live.
Not so, according to a new “Death Map” (left) prepared by researchers Kevin Borden and Susan Cutter at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Compared to other parts of the U.S., the chances of Mother Nature striking you down in Southern California are amazingly low. Far riskier are the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts with their winter chills, along with the northern Great Plains where heat and drought apparently sizzle people to death at higher than average rates.
Not surprisingly, your chances of being done in by cold and floods are also statistically greater in the Rocky Mountain states.
Summing up her research, Cutter explains that “chronic hazards” like severe summer and winter weather are the nation’s true geophysical killers, “not fatalities associated with things like earthquakes or hurricanes.”
