EDITORIAL: New Jersey the nation’s danger zone?

Ocean County is the most dangerous place to live in the country. Monmouth County is fourth. In fact, six of the 15 most dangerous counties are in New Jersey.

That’s what Time Magazine says. Safe to say Time is wrong.

Countless surveys are out there making countless claims, many of them serving as little more than interesting conversation pieces. The integrity of the methodology can vary widely, but most are harmless enough. Even by those loose standards, however, Time’s “study” seems particularly mindless.

Mention Ocean County’s ranking to a New Jerseyan and the assumption is that Hurricane Sandy has a lot to do with it. That would be logical if there was any substance to the survey.

But in this report, the massive damage caused by Sandy doesn’t count any more than a gust of wind that tears off part of someone’s roof, or a lightning strike that injures a person. What Time did is add up the number of disaster “events” that have occurred over more than a half century according to records kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earthquakes and tornadoes go back to 1950 – everything else begins in 1996.

There are more than 40 disaster categories that include relatively ordinary weather like heat and thunderstorms. To qualify as an event there must be either a related fatality, an injury, recorded property damage or crop damage. Time took the total of those events in each county, then incorporated the number of events in neighboring counties to calculate a safety index.

Ocean County itself generated 236 “disasters” — more than 60 percent of them due to “strong wind” which, yes, can occur frequently near the ocean. The vast majority of those events qualified because of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars worth of property damage — which could be a total of one battered roof. Each of those incidents counted just as much under the safety index as Hurricane Sandy.

That’s about all you need to know to understand that the study is nearly worthless. But if nothing else, it does in its own silly way reinforce the need for a better approach to development along the Jersey Shore.

While we can expect plenty of strong wind incidents near any Atlantic coastline, why did New Jersey show up so much higher on the danger lists than other coastal states? Part of the explanation is the sheer amount of our coastline, which increases the percentages that at least one tree might come down in a bad spot. But it’s also the amount of developed coastline and the fact that so much of that development is so close to the water.

In the aftermath of Sandy, much was said about the need for New Jersey to start moving that development away from the shoreline. But in the “Stronger than the Storm” rush to rebuild, Gov. Christie and his administration have done little toward that end.

The Time study is too silly to meaningfully help the cause, but it does still add a little something to the discussion about New Jersey’s vulnerability to weather-related damage along its coast.

And for those looking to flee to safer realms, head to the wide open spaces of Montana, and in particular the idyllic Sweet Grass County, the safest place in the nation.