Anyone looking for a safe place to live in the United States of America should consider moving to Prince of Wales – Outer Ketchikan County in Alaska, the only county that does not report disaster losses in the SHELDUS database.¹⁸  SHELDUS contains more than 640,000 local level disaster loss reports in the United States of America for the period 1960–2009 (Borden and Cutter, 2008) and provides a unique look at extensive risk in a high-income country.

Unlike low- and middle-income-countries, mortality due to disasters in the United States of America is extensively distributed. Most (89 percent) of the mortality since 1960 corresponds to extensive disasters (Figure 2.28). SHELDUS records 26,936 deaths between 1960 and 2008 compared with 18,273 in the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). In contrast, two-thirds of the economic loss is intensively concentrated in only 0.4 percent of the reports.



Figure 2.29 shows that, compared with the other countries in the data universe, mortality in extensive disasters in the United States of America is falling. Figure 2.30, however, shows that even when normalized by GDP per capita, economic loss is rising.



The highest extensive risk mortality rates are strongly associated with a wide geographical corridor that stretches from the north to the southwest of the United States of America, through the states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas (Figure 2.31).



As Figure 2.32 shows, 220 out of the 302 counties (73 percent) with annual mortality rates greater than 15 per million had average annual household incomes of less than US$40,000. Many are sparsely populated counties in the north-to-southwest corridor mentioned above.