Figure 1

The bars that hurt people are the short ones

Purple is an outage-risk event; gray is everything else. These bars stay short because of how the weather service files them. A heat wave or a freeze is written up as one event covering the whole county for several days, while a single hailstorm can generate thirty separate reports in an hour. Ninety-eight reports, spread across 92 different days.

Figure 2 · same time axis as above

Nothing in the grid-stress group comes with a size at all

This panel shows hail, because hail is the only hazard here that gets measured — every stone is recorded in inches across. Heat, cold, drought and freeze events are filed with no size or strength number of any kind, so a ten-day heat wave and a two-day one look identical in the data. That blank field is a large part of why these events read as minor: there is no number to rank them by. Shown here for contrast, not because hail is the story.

Figure 3

Grid stress comes twice a year; everything else comes once

Every panel uses the same vertical scale, so the heights can be compared directly. Outage-risk events are the only group with two busy seasons — 40 reports in July and August, 21 in January and February. Those are the same two windows when electricity demand runs highest and the system has least room to spare. Hail, wind and tornado all cluster into one spring peak instead, and are mostly quiet when the grid is under the most strain.

Figure 4

The damage column has nothing to say about this

All 98 outage-risk events together add up to $6.5M, which is 0.2% of the county's $3.34B. Most of that one figure is the February 2021 freeze, which is the only reason 2021 shows up here at all. The two tall bars are the October 2019 tornadoes and the August 2022 flash flood, and neither belongs to this group. So ranking hazards by dollars puts grid stress at the bottom — but the same nine years put 15 of 22 deaths in it. The column measures damaged buildings, and these events mostly harm people and services instead.