Take this with a grain of sand, but a travel site called Travel Lens has ranked two of the Gulf Coast’s most popular beaches as among the 10 “most dangerous” in the country.

Travel Lens ranked Panama City Beach in Florida as the fourth-most dangerous U.S. beach and Gulf Shores in Alabama as the ninth most dangerous.

One of the measurements is how frequently those beaches have been hit by hurricanes from 1851 to 2020. Hurricanes just don’t sneak up on people like sharks, which also rarely happens.

When hurricanes do hit, there are typically days and even weeks of warnings from weather forecasters, making fatalities for tourists and residents fairly avoidable. The Travel Lens analysis did not take into account hurricane deaths, only whether hurricanes happened, which they do.

Going to a beach during a hurricane might be dangerous, but few people do that.

They also measured shark attacks, which are extremely rare. New Smyrna Beach in Florida ranked most dangerous, mainly because of 32 reported shark attacks since 2010. Panama City Beach is listed as having had two. Gulf Shores is listed as having had three.

Shark attacks are rare, and fatality from a shark attack is extremely rare. Most beach tourists have more to fear from jellyfish stings. We’ve seen some of those and they can be nasty.

The United States recorded 47 confirmed cases of unprovoked shark attacks in 2021, according to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File. Considering the millions of tourists who visit beaches annually without dangerous encounters with sharks, that’s not very many.

Another factor was surfing fatalities, and those tend to happen when people ignore cautions for dangerous water, such as when a hurricane is approaching.

But they made a list, so here it is: