Notice the biggest counties in America — Los Angeles, Cook (Chicago), Harris (Houston) — sit at the very top. That's not a coincidence, and it's not a warning to avoid big cities: this score is built from total expected loss, which grows with how many people and how much property a county has, not just how likely a bad event is for any one resident. A huge county racks up a high score partly because there's simply more there to lose, not because life there is more dangerous person-for-person than a smaller county with a similar rating. What genuinely distinguishes counties is which hazards drive the number (a coastal county's hurricane exposure vs. an inland one's earthquake or wildfire exposure) and how ready each community is to recover — not the raw score alone. It's also not a prediction that anything will happen this year, and not a measure of whether damage has already been repaired — a county can score lower here while a specific storm has still left real, unfinished recovery behind, especially where it hit hardest. Read the score as "how much this place has to absorb over time," not as a ranking of where's safe to live.