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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Oklahoma stuck with high rate of disasters

FEMA ranks it No. 1 in tornados, No. 3 in floods

Maintenance workers from the Moore Public Schools erect crosses Friday at the Plaza Towers Elementary School in memory of the seven children who died during the tornado. (Associated Press)
Seth Borenstein Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Many states get hit frequently with tornadoes and other natural catastrophes, but Oklahoma is Disaster Central.

The twister that devastated Moore, Okla., was the 74th presidential disaster declared in the Sooner State in the past 60 years. Only much-larger and more-populous California and Texas have had more.

The state is No. 1 in tornado disasters and No. 3 for flooding, according to a database of presidential disaster declarations handled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And those figures don’t include drought, which is handled by a different agency.

The explanation is partly atmospheric conditions that trigger twisters and flooding, partly where people live and how they build their homes, and partly politics and bureaucratic skill, according to disaster experts. Even one of the state’s U.S. senators said recently that because of the way federal guidelines are written, Oklahoma is getting disaster aid more often than it needs.

Of the 25 U.S. counties that have been declared disasters the most times since 1953, nine are in Oklahoma, the highest total of any state.

Oklahoma County has been on the disaster list 38 times, more than the entire state of New Jersey. Caddo County, just west of the Oklahoma City metro area, has been named a federal disaster area nine times since 2007, with a litany of woe that includes twisters, floods, ice storms, a blizzard and violent winds.

When disaster declarations are measured on a per-person basis, Oklahoma gets nearly three times the national average. When they are computed based on how much land is in a state, it gets twice the national average, according to an analysis of FEMA records.

The atmospheric explanation is pretty basic: “Oklahoma really is the bull’s-eye for awful tornadoes,” said Mike Lindell, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University.

Oklahoma is in a particularly busy and dangerous section of Tornado Alley, the cluster of states in the nation’s midsection that are especially twister-prone.

That’s because low-pressure systems rush south down the Rocky Mountains and collide with warm, moist air, forming nasty thunderstorms that often spawn tornadoes, said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.

“Welcome to the sweet spot of severe thunderstorms,” Brooks said.

Texas, Kansas and Florida get more tornadoes than Oklahoma does, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But Oklahoma gets more of the biggest ones – the EF5s, like the one that smashed Moore. That’s why the storm lab and the National Weather Service storm prediction center are in Oklahoma, Lindell said.

With severe thunderstorms, you can get both tornadoes and flooding. Oklahoma has been declared a disaster 35 times because of tornadoes and 44 times because of flooding. In some instances, a combination tornado-and-flood disaster was declared.