According to the Nathan World Map of Natural Hazards, the biggest hazards in my hometown are tropical cyclones.  Apparently, these winds can even reach up to 300 kilometers per hour, which could easily devastate an entire city.  My home, being located in Bucks County, also is susceptible to hail storms, which I have seen multiple times before.  However, I feel these findings from the map may not be 100 percent accurate.  While I do see hail once in a while, it has never been to the point of it causing danger.  When it comes to “tropical cyclones”, I think the wind is fairly calm where I am from, especially compared to what we have been experiencing here in State College lately.  The Nathan World Map of Natural Hazards does do a good job at getting the general sense for hazards in your area, but there is definitely some discrepancies when it gets to the more local level.

One type of hazard that really interests me is Biological Hazards.  These can include many types of diseases and viruses that are capable of spreading from human to human.  There was recently an outbreak of Elizabethkingia meningoseptica, a disease that affected 44 people and killed 17 of those.  If this were to happen in my hometown, I think the sickness would not spread nearly as far as it did in Wisconsin.  I live in an area where the population is very spread out, so it would be much less likely to come in contact with someone affected by the disease.  Also, we live a short drive from Philadelphia which has multiple very good medical facilities.  The one thing that could make it a little more prominent would be the fact that there are a good amount of children and elders in the area, who are more likely to get infected.  When it comes to scale, I would think that this town was more populated than were I am from, which may have caused it to spread even easier.  Even though it was only 44 people infected, that is a huge number for this deadly of a disease. Due to the probable smaller scale of my hometown, the impact would most likely be a lot less.  The citizens of my hometown would be much less vulnerable to this outbreak than the citizens of a city like Philadelphia or New York.  The fact that these places are so crowded, and also have a high level of people in poverty, would make the outbreak much more likely and much more severe.  Biological hazards like this one heavily depend on where they occur.