Science News Review

Rubbernecking At Home: The US “Death Map”

Dec 18 at 9:09pm by Aileen

For those of us who tend to be fascinated by charts, graphs, figures, maps and gnarly scenes of death and destruction, there’s a new county-by-county “Death Map” produced by researchers at the University of South Carolina at Columbia we can now peruse for the gnarly truth about who dies where the most.

Using statistics going all the way back to 1970, Susan Cutter and Kevin Borden of USC created the map to enable emergency management planners to examine various natural hazard risks to populations all over the country. These are deaths by floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, extreme temperatures and other natural (but violent) causes.

The full publication from the International Journal of Health Geographics is available as a pdf at Spatial patterns of natural hazards mortality in the United States. But here’s a sneak preview… what’s your county’s ‘death-by-natural-hazard’ risk look like?