The Next Disaster: Are We Ready?

A special report on 10 high-risk cities.

Are We Really Prepared?

After the attacks on September 11 and the hurricanes that slammed the Gulf Coast last year, you'd expect our major cities to be ready with disaster plans that will save lives and property. There's no doubt we'll be hit again -- maybe even harder -- because the list of possible calamities is long: from a bird flu pandemic to a massive California earthquake, to more monster storms, to another terrorist attack.

But are we really prepared to protect people, as well as their homes and businesses? Every major urban area has received federal funding, much of it from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in order to make their cities more secure. But there are no set criteria for measuring preparedness (the feds are working on that), and the quality of disaster plans varies widely throughout the country.

So Reader's Digest decided to do an independent assessment of 10 high-risk urban areas, focusing on key security indicators. We analyzed public data, consulted with federal and local emergency workers, and contacted the mayors' offices to gauge the readiness of these cities to meet both natural and man-made disasters. For each of 11 separate measures, a city got






We gave point values to each of these marks, then converted the totals into a final grade for each city. View our results to find out which high-risk cities made the grade.

Our criteria fell under three main categories:
Emergency Readiness
Crisis Communications
Medical Response

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• Be Prepared for Emergencies
• These 11 websites will help you plan ahead for natural or man-made disasters.
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• Are You Prepared?
• You'll want these survival kits close at hand when emergencies strike.
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• Building A Storm Shelter
• Construct a safe room for shelter against tornadoes and hurricanes
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• Come Hell and High Water
• A volunteer goes deep into Hurricane Katrina's disaster zone and reports on the sacrifice, death, and destruction.
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• How to Deal With the Uncontrollable
• 13 ways to maintain a healthy perspective.
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• A Healing Force
• How one heroic doctor is helping her hurricane-ravaged town get back on the map.
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