Analysis: Why The US leads the world in weather catastrophes

The US leads the world in weather catastrophes. Here's why The United States is Earth's punching bag for nasty weather. The nation's weather chief and other experts say the U.S. gets hit by stronger, costlier, more varied and frequent extreme weather than anywhere on Earth. Those include tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, blizzards and the like. The reason is geography. Two oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, mountains, the jet stream and jutting peninsulas all combine to brew up severe storms. But nasty weather by itself isn't a disaster. What makes nature's bad hand a disaster is humans. It's where people build, what they build and how. AP NEWS

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“One of the ways in which you can make your communities more resilient is to not develop them in the most hazard-prone way or in the most hazard-prone portion of the community,” Cutter said. “The insistence on building up barrier islands and development on barrier islands, particularly on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast, knowing that that sand is going to move and having hurricanes hit with some frequency ... seems like a colossal waste of money.”

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