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Anonymous
For simplicity's sakeSlate still lacks a supercomputer to handle massive number-crunching assignmentswe automatically eliminated the 30 states with the most declared disasters. Most were no-brainers, such as the hurricane-prone states of the Gulf Coast and the heartland states that lie in Tornado Alley. Sparsely populated North Dakota has regular problems with severe flooding, as do Virginia, Tennessee, and New York. (Flooding, tornadoes, and tropical storms/hurricanes have been the most prolific killers in recent years, although heat waves often take significant tolls.) Illinois and Pennsylvania didn't make the grade because their cities can get lethally hot. Also disqualified were some notably frigid members of the union, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota; blizzards and icy conditions are frequently deadly, especially for motorists. And seemingly placid West Virginia? It has some issues with landslides, particularly in the counties that border Ohio.
That left 20 states, two of which we knocked out immediately on common-sense grounds: Hawaii, since islands are inherently at the ocean's mercy (plus there's a slew of volcanoes), and Alaska, where severe winter storms are the norm. For the remaining 18 states, then, we looked at year-by-year fatalities resulting from severe weather, dating back to 1995, as recorded by the National Weather Service. The NWS statistics cover 27 different types of weather events, including such relative rarities as deaths due to volcanic ash, fog, dust devils, and "miscellaneous." (Since California had been eliminated at this stage, we ignored earthquake fatalities, which the NWS does not track.) We then used the total number of fatalities from each state to arrive at a deaths-per-thousand figure, based on population numbers taken from the 2000 Census.
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