Volcanic Ashfall in the United States

How dangerous are Volcanic Ashfall events in the U.S.?

Where this hazard actually strikes varies sharply by region. The three states absorbing the largest share of events are Hawaii (71 events, 0 fatalities), Alaska (2 events, 0 fatalities), a pattern driven more by climatology than by any one state's vulnerability.

This is a more frequency-heavy than loss-heavy record. The hazard ranks #47 by event count but #52 for combined property and crop damage, a gap of 5 places. Its listed losses represent 0% of the catalog total. The human-toll rank is #51, or 0% of recorded fatalities, so neither event count nor damage rank substitutes for the other.

The cumulative NOAA record has a smaller reported human toll than most hazard types on this measure: 0 fatalities and 0 injuries among 73 events. PlainHazard's low human-toll band means fewer than five recorded fatalities during 2015-2025. It does not mean that an individual event is harmless, or that unrecorded impacts are zero.

The annual record is uneven rather than steadily rising or falling. The peak year on record was 2018, logging 65 events and $0 in property damage in a single calendar year. The most recent year in the dataset is 2023 with 7 events recorded. Across the full 3-year window, annual event counts reflect natural year-to-year noise given how infrequently this hazard is recorded at all.

NOAA records too few volcanic ashfall events (73 events) to express a stable per-event fatality rate; a single incident would swing it by a wide margin. The cumulative record stands at 0 fatalities and 0 injuries, and no property or crop damage is recorded. Read those as counts, not as a rate.

NOAA entries are reports filed by local National Weather Service offices. Counts therefore reflect both observed weather and reporting practice; they do not measure unreported events, household exposure, or the probability of a future event at one address.