Fort Worth Makes List of Top Five Best Cities to Be In During a Zombie Apocalypse

This is kind of a no-brainer given the fact that our city is named after a fort.

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I know for a fact, that us Fort Worthians are proud of where we come from. So much so, we convey the merits of our western metropolis to anyone in our eaves range on the rare occasion we venture out of town. Well, we have one more thing to add to this long list of merits. Cowtown just placed as one of the top five cities in the nation that could withstand a zombie apocalypse according to a recent study conducted by Wanderu, a travel search platform. I know, this may sound far-fetched and a bit silly, but if you think about it, Cowtown is stacked with a vast number of resources in every direction.

For example, did you know Fort Worth has a whopping 36 interstates bobbing and weaving in and out of town? This is very helpful when the time may come to flee, plus having an extensive road infrastructure allows for efficient evacuation or supply runs into the rural areas of Texas.

One such supply all of us would have to look for in the event such as a zombie apocalypse is food. Long after the big box stores have been ransacked, we can still satiate our hunger pains given 76 % of our state’s land is dedicated to farms and livestock. It’s a certainty that there will be no shortage of beef, corn, and other crops. In fact, an apocalypse probably wouldn’t have much of an impact on a typical Texas BBQ other than watching out for a slurry of uninvited guests (who aren’t looking for smoked brisket anyhow).

Another thing that sets us apart from other cities, is how much ammo we may have in our possession on any given day of the week. This along with the abundance of hunting stores in the city could equip us with all of the gear necessary to take out a zombie and supplement our food supply at the same time, which just increases our self-sufficiency.

But enough about us for a second. The real question is how we can quantify this creepy claim, which you have to admit is kind of cool.

According to Wanderu, the selection process for this rating began by selecting the 50 most populated cities in the United States, per the World Population Review, which provided the travel platform with a baseline for its analysis. Using this same data, Wanderu obtained the population density information for each city. Next up, researchers used Cause IQ’s Organization Search to find data on the number of medical facilities in each metro area.

For bus and train carrier info, Wanderu used its own internal data base to cull from. Open Street Map API was used to determine the number of Interstates out of each city, which included a detailed view of road networks. The travel platform used this info to eliminate duplicate interstates from each city for the most accurate count possible. This study even went as far as using the Yelp API to explore the number of hunting stores each city has and compared them to each metropolis’ population counts to determine “per capita” amounts.

The final chunk of data Wanderu provided in this study highlighted the percentage of each state’s acreage dedicated to farmland from the USDA Economic Research Service.

Once all this data was gathered, each category was normalized to ensure a fair comparison among the cities. The final step combined these normalized scores to create an overall ranking for each of the 50 cities. The outcome revealed which cities are best suited for surviving a zombie outbreak and which ones might leave you more vulnerable when the undead come knocking.

Rankings of the top five U.S. Cities that could withstand a zombie apocalypse:

  1. Kansas City
  2. Oklahoma City
  3. Jacksonville, Florida
  4. Tulsa, Oklahoma
  5. Fort Worth, Texas

Rankings of the five worst cities to be in during a zombie apocalypse:

  1. San Francisco, California
  2. Boston, Massachusetts
  3. Long Beach, California
  4. New York City
  5. San Jose, California

---FOO BAR