Pull Lee County’s record out of FEMA’s National Risk Index and the hazard sitting at the top of the list is not the one anybody around Tupelo would guess. Earthquake scores 93.4 out of 100. Tornado scores 86.8. Flood is 72.0, hurricane 68.8, wildfire 36.6. On the composite, Lee County lands at 81.3 — the twelfth highest of Mississippi’s 82 counties.
That is the finding, and it needs a qualification in the same breath, because a number like that is easy to read wrong.
What the index is actually measuring
The National Risk Index is a relative score, not a forecast. FEMA builds it from expected annual loss — how often a hazard shows up, how much is sitting in its way, and how badly the thing in its way tends to get hurt — then adjusts for social vulnerability and community resilience. Every county gets ranked against every other county.
The words “how much is sitting in its way” are doing a lot of work. Lee County holds the largest concentration of buildings, people, and payroll in this corner of the state. Tupelo alone puts more square footage in the path of any given hazard than the counties around it. A high score there says as much about what Lee County owns as about what the ground under it does.
The New Madrid part
The earthquake number is not a data glitch. The New Madrid seismic zone runs through northeastern Arkansas, southeastern Missouri, southwestern Kentucky, and northwestern Tennessee — near enough that northeast Mississippi sits on its southern shoulder. In the winter of 1811 and 1812 that zone produced three earthquakes the USGS estimates between magnitude 7 and 8. They were felt as far away as Hartford, Charleston, and New Orleans.
USGS puts the current odds at 25 to 40 percent for a magnitude 6.0 or larger event in the next 50 years, and 7 to 10 percent for a repeat of the 1811–1812 sequence in that same window. Those are the agency’s own numbers, and they come with the agency’s own caveat: probabilities like these say nothing about where the shaking would land.
The part that doesn’t help our case
Two things worth saying plainly.
First, our home county scores low. Tishomingo County comes in at 37.1 — 58th of 82, the bottom half of the state. If Tupelo’s 81.3 made you think this whole corner of Mississippi is a hot spot, the index says otherwise about the county our office sits in.
Second, a relative score is not a probability. Ranking twelfth in Mississippi for a hazard does not mean the hazard is likely. Most people reading this will live their whole lives in Lee or Itawamba or Prentiss County without ever seeing an earthquake claim, and we are not going to dress the number up as something it isn’t. It’s a ranking. It’s useful the way a ranking is useful — for knowing what the models weight, not for knowing what happens next.
How policies typically treat ground movement
Here is the piece most people have never checked. Standard homeowners forms generally exclude earth movement — earthquake, landslide, mudflow, sinkhole collapse — as a category. Where earthquake coverage is available at all, it is usually written as a separate endorsement or a standalone policy, and it usually carries its own deductible, frequently stated as a percentage of the dwelling limit rather than a flat dollar amount. A percentage deductible on a house is a very different number from the one on the front of the policy.
Forms vary on all of that more than people expect, and none of it can be settled from the outside. The document that says how yours is written is your policy, sitting wherever you keep it.
What’s worth ten minutes
Two pages. On the declarations page, look for a line naming earthquake or earth movement and a deductible attached to it. In the exclusions section, look for the paragraph headed “Earth Movement” and read what it lists. Whatever you find there is the actual answer for your house — better than any index, ours included.
If you want somebody to find those two pages with you, come by the Tupelo office, see our home insurance page, or call or text 662-454-7831.
This article is general information about how coverage typically works, not advice about your specific situation. Your policy is the contract, and it’s the only thing that says what you have. If you’d like someone to read it with you, that’s what we’re here for.
