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Background: Studies on natural hazard mortality are most often hazard-specific (e.g. floods, earthquakes, heat), event specific (e.g. Hurricane Katrina), or lack adequate temporal or geographic coverage. This makes it difficult to assess mortality from natural hazards in any systematic way. This paper examines the spatial patterns of natural hazard mortality at the county-level for the U.S. from 1970-2004 using a combination of geographical and epidemiological methods.

Abstract:In the United States, direct losses from natural hazards are on the rise with hurricanes, flooding, and severe storms contributing about three quarters of the total damages. While losses from severe storms have been stable over the past fifty years, hurricane and flood losses have tripled. Per capita losses are also increasing showing that impacts outpace population growth with high per capita losses occurring largely in the Southeast and Midwest. If the loss escalation of the past two decades continues into the future, then direct losses of $300 to $400 billion within a single decade are possible. In order to reverse this trend, sustainable development, vulnerability reduction, and hazard mitigation must become priorities and current loss reduction efforts need to be evaluated and re-assessed in terms of their effectiveness. These conclusions are drawn from the analysis of spatial and temporal trends in direct losses from natural hazards using SHELDUS TM data from 1960 through 2009. Loss data are adjusted for inflation, population, and wealth to capture both trends in total losses and per capita losses. The loss data are then compared to disaster-related federal government and private insurance expenditures.

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Hazards are taught with the belief that knowing something about their occurrence might help us avoid their consequences. The integrative nature of hazards -physical and social systems bound together -is attractive to the student and the instructor alike. Answering why we teach hazards is fairly straightforward. A more pressing question at present is this: how should we teach about hazards? To a large degree, attention towards how we teach hazards in a K-12 environment has been sparse. In this paper we explore the challenges faced when introducing hazards geography in a pre-collegiate setting. Following a review of the status of teaching hazards and the use of geographic information systems as an instructional aid, we outline a hazards course taught successfully for middle school students and discuss implementation obstacles for the traditional classroom.

The authors wish to make the following correction to this paper. Due to mislabeling, replace: [...]