Across the United States

Tornado: Major US health threat

Across the United States, among natural disasters and environmental events, Tornados are responsible for the greatest harm to human life and property damage as evidenced by the number of Fatalities and Injuries, and cumulative property damage costs relative to all other natural events. This is evidenced by data from the National weather service.

The while leading in fatalities and injuries, t ## Data Processing

The data is avaialble here

Additional information is available here and here

We will read the data from the StormData.csv.bz file and create a summary of the fatalities, injuries, and value of property damage. We’ll order the data by the number of fatalities and injuries per cause

library(dplyr)
## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'
## 
## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter, lag
## 
## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
storm <- read.csv(bzfile('StormData.csv.bz2'))
storm_human <- group_by(storm, EVTYPE) %>% summarize(f=sum(FATALITIES), inj = sum(INJURIES), prop = sum(PROPDMG)) %>% arrange(desc(f + inj))

Results

The top 10 risks to human life and health in the US are shown in the chart below:

barplot(storm_human$f[1:10] + storm_human$inj[1:10],names.arg = storm_human$EVTYPE[1:10], cex.names = 0.5)
lines(storm_human$prop[1:10])

By adding the number of fatalities to the number of injuries caused by each system and ordering by their cumulative numbers, Tornados clearly pose the greatest threat to human health in the US.