This Is the Safest City in the Whole Country

If you have a deep fear of natural disasters, avoid Oklahoma City, which was ranked the worst US city for such disasters in a new report by WalletHub. On the natural-disaster front, Dover, Delaware, emerged as the safest, but not the safest overall. WalletHub used data from the Census Bureau, FBI, FTC, FDIC, Gun Violence Archive, and several other sources to arrive at its safest-cities list, which leans heavily toward New England cities. To arrive at its rankings, WalletHub took into account home and community safety, natural disaster risk, and financial safety. Among the 44 metrics it used are ones related to COVID deaths, presence of terrorist attacks, sex offenders per capita, hail and wildfire risk, foreclosure rate, and firefighters, EMTs, and law enforcement personnel per capita.

According to WalletHub, these are the overall 10 safest cities in the US:

1. Columbia, Maryland
2. South Burlington, Vermont
3. Nashua, New Hampshire
4. Yonkers, New York
5. Madison, Wisconsin
6. Portland, Maine
7. Warwick, Rhode Island
8. Raleigh, North Carolina
9. Burlington, Vermont
10. Winston-Salem, North Carolina

And these are the bottom five of the list of 182 cities evaluated for safety:

• Memphis, Tennessee
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• San Bernardino, California
• Fort Lauderdale, Florida
• St. Louis, Missouri

(Read the full list here.)