How Would The Jersey Shore Handle A Zombie Apocalypse? Not Well, Apparently

By BETH DALBEY (Patch Staff)

Of all the information you don’t need to know, this ranks high. But, hey, it’s Halloween, and if you can’t talk about your community’s ability to survive a zombie apocalypse now, when can you?

And despite all the practice New Jersey has had with the Asbury Park Zombie Walk, the hopes for those of us in the Garden State are not too promising.

The folks at Careerbuilder took some time out from helping Americans find jobs to put together the Zombie Apocalypse Index, which scored metropolitian areas on their chances of survival against an everyday flesh-eating virus in eight different factors in four categories: ability to defend against the virus; ability to contain the virus; ability to find a cure; and ability to outlast the virus with an ample food supply.

New Jersey is in trouble because the two metropolitan areas flanking it -- New York and Philadelphia -- both landed near the bottom of the list.

The Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, Del. area ranked 43rd out of 53 metropolitan areas ranked. It was 11th on the ability to find a cure but 49th when it comes to virus containment.

The New York-Newark-Jersey City area came in dead last, at No. 53, with a containment rank of 53 and a food supply ranking of 38.

But the New York area ranked 13th on the ability to defend against the virus. Go figure.

If you really want to survive — and if the world is suddenly overtaken by hordes of entrail-eating zombies, do you? — you’ll need to head to the Boston area. Or, better yet, head to the wilderness of places like Montana and the Dakotas, where no one lives.

Here are the top 10 places to survive the walking dead:

1. Boston
2. Salt Lake City
3. Columbus, Ohio
4. Baltimore
5. Virginia Beach, Va.
6. Seattle
7. San Diego
8. Kansas City, Mo.
9. Denver
10. Indianapolis

Happy Halloween.

(Asbury Park Zombie Walk 2010, by Hypnotica Studios Infinite, via Flickr/Creative Commons license)