Tornados: A source of death, injury, and destruction

Tornados are the leading cause of injury, death, and destruction in the United States. An analysis of “Storm Weather Preparation” data from the National Weather Service, shows that tornados cause more death, injuries, and property damage than any other weather event.

Data Processing

The “Storm Weather Preparation” dataset was analyzed in R. The data were transformed into a data set that was grouped by event type. For the analysis below, the variables of interest were the total number of deaths, total number of injuries, and total amount of property damage.

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## Attaching package: 'dplyr'
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Findings

The analysis found that tornatos were the leading cause of death, injuries, and property damage.

Death

The top ten sources of death can be seen in Table 1 below. Tornados are the most frequent, followed by excessive heat and flash floods.

Table 1.

## # A tibble: 10 × 2
##    EVTYPE         death
##    <chr>          <dbl>
##  1 TORNADO         5633
##  2 EXCESSIVE HEAT  1903
##  3 FLASH FLOOD      978
##  4 HEAT             937
##  5 LIGHTNING        816
##  6 TSTM WIND        504
##  7 FLOOD            470
##  8 RIP CURRENT      368
##  9 HIGH WIND        248
## 10 AVALANCHE        224

This is also seen on Figure 1, below:

#Injuries

As seen with deaths, tornados are the leading cause of injuries. Thunderstorm wind, flooding, and excessive heat are also major contibutors.

## # A tibble: 10 × 2
##    EVTYPE             hurt
##    <chr>             <dbl>
##  1 TORNADO           91346
##  2 TSTM WIND          6957
##  3 FLOOD              6789
##  4 EXCESSIVE HEAT     6525
##  5 LIGHTNING          5230
##  6 HEAT               2100
##  7 ICE STORM          1975
##  8 FLASH FLOOD        1777
##  9 THUNDERSTORM WIND  1488
## 10 HAIL               1361

This can be seen in Figure 2, below:

Property Damage

Tornados are also the leading contributor of property damage. Flash floods, thunderstorm winds, and flooding are also major sources of property damage. This can be seen in the table below.

## # A tibble: 10 × 2
##    EVTYPE               damage
##    <chr>                 <dbl>
##  1 TORNADO            3212258.
##  2 FLASH FLOOD        1420125.
##  3 TSTM WIND          1335966.
##  4 FLOOD               899938.
##  5 THUNDERSTORM WIND   876844.
##  6 HAIL                688693.
##  7 LIGHTNING           603352.
##  8 THUNDERSTORM WINDS  446293.
##  9 HIGH WIND           324732.
## 10 WINTER STORM        132721.

Figure 3, below, shows the total damage from the ten most expensive damage types.