While the past couple of weeks has shown us that Elizabethton is not safe from snow, an insurance website recently ranked Elizabethton as the safest city in the state when it comes to severe weather.

HomeownersInsurance.com, a consumer-centric insurance marketplace, recently conducted a study to find the cities in Tennessee with the best safety records when it comes to severe weather threats such as tornadoes, lighting, hail and flooding. The results of the study were announced Feb. 25 with Elizabethton claiming the top honor.

“To find the safest cities, analysts at HomeownersInsurance.com used a variety of storm data points to create total score for 51 Tennessee cities with populations greater than 10,000,” said Michelle Billick, a spokeswoman for HomeownersInsurance.com. “Analysts used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration storm events database to factor in occurrences of tornadoes, hail and lightning in each area. The total score also took into account the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System.”

HomeownersInsurance.com conducts studies such as this on a regular basis, but this is the first time the organization has focused on Tennessee, Billick said.

“Being that the state of Tennessee tends to get effected by an array of bad weather conditions, such as tornadoes, flood, hail, winter weather, etc., we decided to take a positive spin on the matter and look at the ‘safer severe weather zones’” Billick said. “This report outlines areas that have been less impacted by severe weather, according to data that we compiled from NOAA.”

To conduct the study, researchers looked at the tornado, lighting, hail and flood scores for the cities, which are on a 0-10 scale with 0 being the best and 10 being the worst, Billick said.

For the tornado, lightning, hail and flood scores, analysts reviewed all individual storm events identified by the NOAA Storm Events Database from 1965 to October 2014 and weighted scores as follows: number of storm event occurrences (35 percent), number of direct storm event related deaths (25 percent), number of direct storm related incidents of property damage (25 percent) and number of direct storm event related injuries (15 percent). For data sources only available on a county level, cites were assigned points based on the information for the county in which the city is predominantly located. Analysts only looked at TN cities with a population of 10,000 or above.

Below are the state’s 10 safest cities according to the study released by HomeownersInsurance.com:

1. Elizabethton

2. McMinnville

3. Oak Ridge

4. Morristown

5. Spring City

6. White House

7. Brownsville

8. Dickson

9. Union City

10. Manchester

For a link to the full report from HomeownersInsurance.com, please visit https://homeownersinsurance.com/blog/tennessees-safest-cities-from-severe-weather-damage/