Not exactly. This maps shows insurance claims related to natural disasters, not incidence of natural disasters. Big states out west have very low population density as compared to spots east of the Mississippi. If a raging forest fire or severe storm happens on a big stretch of BLM land in Nevada, nobody's going to make an insurance claim about it.

That was my impression as well. While hurricane prone areas are highlighted well, once you move out of those areas, the map seems to start correlating to population to a large degree. Granted there are some cities missing and and some rural areas as red spots.

Charlotte and Raleigh are conspicuously absent.

If nature happens and nothing gets damaged is it really a "disaster"?

Exactly. Property losses correlates with population density. Related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1138/

That was not my takeaway. My takeaway was that these are places where no one is, and thus there is not a significant amount of damage.

Most of Nevada is downright uninhabitable or very close to uninhabitable and resource poor. It’s mostly owned by the US government and completely barren of water and plant life. Basically, it’s as though the great disaster were an everyday thing-and actually somewhat stable in its constant dry heat. Pretty sure it was largely that way in pre-US times.

Now that's just uninformed. Yes most of it is BLM/USFS land, but there is definitely plant life, it's desert, some of it high desert, with snow in the winter and everything. You can have 70 degree weather in the summer in NV if you know where to go.

That said, there is definitely a reason Nevada is the place they tested a bunch of nuclear weapons. :)

As a resident of Utah we have our own environmental problems.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2018/01/09/utahs-air...

Michigan is pretty nice. The occasional tornado rips a few awnings off buildings, but it's nothing that would bother a datacenter or whatever.

We're seismically stable, too. Fairly far from the New Madrid fault that threatens sizable chunks of the rest of the midwest.

I don’t know about Oregon. The really big one is supposed to happen anytime now.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

New Mexico’s alright. The only real worry we have is fires. Even so, they never seem like as big of a deal as the ones in California.

Now, there is a supervolcano in the middle of the state, but it seems pretty docile at the moment.

Nope, Vermont:

https://www.thestreet.com/slideshow/14312303/1/safest-us-sta...

Northern New England is in general a pretty safe place to live, as long as you can deal with a little bit of snow or an ice storm once a decade. There's water enough that forest fires are a rarity, tornados are very rare, hurricanes usually have played themselves out by the time they make it this far, and there are no volcanoes. There are earthquakes pretty frequently, but they're such small magnitude that I mistake them for the Amtrak going by[1].

[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j4EsVRA84Ck/UH7cea8dhOI/AAAAAAAAMx... - I thought this was the dryer walking around when it happened...

Hahahah, that's great. I actually found out about the earthquake before it happened, on Twitter, so I actually knew it was an earthquake, but still. Had to check the date though, I didn't think it was 6 years ago, felt more like 3!

Even Connecticut is pretty safe, as long as you stay away from the coast.

Oregon: https://www.opb.org/news/series/unprepared/

Yeah, Oregon hasn't seen a meaningful earthquake in most anyone's memory, so it isn't high on the list to prepare for one that might be coming, or not, in our lifetimes. Definitely want to avoid the area if you're averse to that risk...

Utah does look blank, but wasn't there a tornado in SLC a few years ago?

Yes, there was one in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Salt_Lake_City_tornado

Strangely, it seemed to mostly affect the run-down part of town that was due for redevelopment, and completely destroyed the local gay bar (The Sun) which was the last business hold-out resisting the gentrification of the area.

Apparently the weather-modification tests of the '50s and '60s are bearing fruit.