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Compare the number of times FEMA has declared a disaster in your state vs the rest of the states since 1953:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/jun/02/us-disasters-mapped

This one is more finely grained (by county) and gives a pie chart for each region showing why they declared the various disasters:

http://www.gismaps.fema.gov/historical.pdf

My state being a disaster has more to do with my fellow citizens and the local inability to drive than it does with mother nature!

Woo Hoo! most disaster prone state!

I still don't see how TX has 1000+ hurricanes in 50 years. Must be municipalities or counties affected by hurricanes.

I didn't realize California has had 53 hurricanes.

more likely they've had 2 that hit 25 counties.

Washington has a lot of floods and storms but not to bad overall

Yes, since the late 60's there is one disaster declaration per county. So, for instance, hurricane Katrina itself resulted in 179 declarations, and hurricane Rita resulted in 318 disaster declarations - and those were just for the actual on-the-ground damage.

They have the full dataset available. Looking, for instance, at Washtenaw county, where I live, I find there have only been 8 disaster declarations. Storms, tornadoes, flooding, snowstorms, and the 2003 northeast power outage apparently resulted in a disaster declaration. Further, we had a disaster declaration titled, "Hurricane Katrina Evacuation" another 2,695 counties in the US had (just short of the 3k counties that exist in the US).

Keep in mind that FEMA declares a lot of disasters based on the idea that a state may need federal aid, or even federal troops (national guard, for instance) in some cases where no physical damage took place. The Evacuation was probably so each county could pull on national funds in order to help out with Katrina in various ways.

So, unfortunately, that map doesn't tell a good story since it probably includes the disaster declarations that weren't actually due to a disaster in that state.

They should be declaring New Orleans after every freakin' Mardi Gras season.

Emrys said:

They should be declaring New Orleans after every freakin' Mardi Gras season.

Click to expand...

...and after every early morning bar closing...

Hylian said:

Washington has a lot of floods and storms but not to bad overall

Click to expand...

At first I was surprised to see Washington with a darker red, but once I saw it was because of floods, then the lightbulb turned on! Really not bad at all.

Minnesota has had 87 Hurricane disasters, so it's obviously not based on actual hurricane touchdowns.

It could be like the time Pittsburgh was hit as hard by a tropical storm as Houston was.