The 10 Illinois Places Most Likely to Get Clobbered By a Twister

If you've lived in Illinois or Missouri, do you sometimes feel like there is a tornado magnet under our part of America? That's likely not the case, but there are definitely some places in Illinois that are more likely to get hit by a twister than others. I've located a roundup of the top 10.

The tornado index is a scientific method that the National Weather Service, NOAA and FEMA uses to classify the likelihood of a tornado impact on a specific area. I found the data site USA.com that allowed me to ask their database to rank the Illinois places based on that tornado index. The first number in bold is the tornado index for that Illinois town. The last number is the population. Here are the top 10 according to them:

1. 323.89 Belleville, IL / 43,296
2. 323.34 Caseyville, IL / 4,080
3. 323.20 Fairview Heights, IL / 17,250
4. 322.85 Collinsville, IL / 25,282
5. 321.67 Mitchell, IL / 1,301
6. 321.00 Swansea, IL / 13,870
7. 320.53 Granite City, IL / 29,764
8. 318.77 Pontoon Beach, IL / 5,804
9. 318.23 Hartford, IL / 1,529
10. 316.89 Washington Park, IL / 4,120

Here's what the Illinois locations look like on FEMA's tornado risk map.

FEMA says the Illinois places and their tornado index "represent a community's relative risk for Tornados when compared to the rest of the United States".

As the University of Illinois Extension Service mentions, there are many that believe Illinois is now a part of what has traditionally been referred to as Tornado Alley, the part of the country that sees the most frequent and intense twisters. Time and new data will tell if the Land of Lincoln is indeed a dangerous place to be when dangerous wind can suddenly drop from the sky.