Fact of the Day: Warm Weather

In 2008, the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina began to create a natural disaster fatality map for the United States using statistics from about 20,000 such deaths between the years 1970 and 2004. They determined that location didn't play a very important role in natural disaster fatalities; rather, warm weather was the culprit, with heat and drought accounting for 19.6% of those deaths, followed by severe summer storms, which accounted for 18.8%.