Just wondering why is it that people live in areas where there are tornados or earthquakes. Wouldnt it be cheaper and safer to move?
To where? Places where they have hurricanes, mudslides and volcanic eruptions? Places with inadequate fresh water? Endemic malaria?
Risk is everywhere. Arable land with potable water is valuable. And worth putting up with some risk to own.
Having lived in California with earthquakes, and Washington DC with horrible summer heat, California is a nicer place to live.
It’s only too bad so many people want to live there. It drives rents through the roof. So I’m stuck with horrible humidity, an everyday summer occurance, whereas significant earthquakes happen like once a decade.
While there is certainly risk everywhere, some things are just dumb. Our government bears some culpability, for example, by providing tax-subsidized flood insurance to people who build their houses right on top of rivers or oceans. If a private insurance company won’t go near it, I wouldn’t build a house there.
Let’s just talk about the level of risk. I’ve lived in tornado alley for 54 years now. I know one person who had her roof taken off by a tornado. She wasn’t hurt. I don’t know anyone else who has suffered from tornado damage. My brother’s plant was badly damaged by one, but he wasn’t there, and they were up and running in three days. I’ve never seen a tornado, and noplace I lived has ever been within a mile of a tornado. I saw a dust devil in a plowed field once. I was thrilled at the thought that that I might be seeing the birth of a twister. Naaaaah.
In short, if a poor unfortunate like me has never even seen a tornado in 54 years, how big a risk is it? Hell, I’m more likely to be elected to Congress. :eek:
I grew up in California, now live in Missouri which has tornadoes, and occasionally her from old friends who are worried about the risk. Here’r some emails I wrote in repsonse:
Email 1:
Fred,
Missouri covers 69,708 miles. The recent tornadoes affected about 5 square miles and really destroyed less than 1 square mile. Not us. They’ve certainly occurred within a few miles of where we now live, and our old place in the city was only 1 block from the path of a tornado that happened in 1927. So the odds aren’t zero, but they’re close enough. More folks die by lightening strike than by tornado hit. And Missouri drivers are easily 20 times more deadly than Missouri tornados and lightning put together.
Still, thanks for thinking of us …
LSLGuy
He then cahllenged my assertion about the risk posed by drivers vs tornadoes, to which I replied
Email 2:
Fred,
From http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lsx/climate/svr_2002.txt we learn that in 2002 tornados killed 2 people in western IL while lightning killed 1 person in eastern MO. That’s the total loss for the area I mentioned in my previous email, which although not exactly coincident with MO, is the area surrounding St. Louis and is a land area equal to about 1/3rd of MO’s area. From my local experience, it’s certainly representative of all of MO in terms of weather and population density, the two main factors relevant to death rates by tornados and lightning. Assuming the area IS representative, that leads to a tornado + lightning (“T&L”) kill figure for 2002 of about 3*3 = 9. Let’s be generous and call it 10.
From http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/departments/nrd-30/ncsa/SDS.html, specifically the link to appendix E (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/Rpts/2002/809_301/20appendixE.pdf), we learn that in 1999 the drivers in MO killed approximately 1100 people and injured a further 78,000. 220 of those killed were killed in alcohol-related accidents and 360 were killed in speeding related accidents. I’m not sure if those two categories overlap, but I assume so. Both are reasonable proxies for lousy driving.
If we assume that only the alcohol-related accidents are driver-caused (they’re certainly the result of lousy driving judgment if not lousy driving technique), and we further assume that all the remaining accidents are truly “accidents”, where nobody’s at fault but Fate, we still get a kill rate of tornado + lightning = 10 and drink-and-drive = 220. That’s more than a 20 to 1 ratio.
If we assume all accidents are really avoidable driver error (admittedly a bit extreme), then the score is tornado+ lightning = 10 and drivers = 1100, for a ratio around 110 to 1.
I agree that neither of these data sources is perfect, and I admit they’re for different years, but the big picture conclusion stands. In MO, cars & drivers kill lots more people than tornados & lightning, by a factor somewhere between 20 and 100 to 1.
Even if we assume 2002 was a very, very safe year for T&L and multiply that experience by 5 for an assumed more typical year, the ration of T&L to cars & drivers is somewhere between 4 and 20 to 1.
The significant fact, as always, is that tornadoes & earthquakes are newsworthy, whereas the slow steady carnage of driving, and smoking, and influenza, and … are not. The other significant fact, borne out by a lot of psychological research, is that humans are positively LOUSY at judging risk. They can be trained to compute the fats and trust the numbers, but it’ll never “feel” right, because our emotional reptile brain risk-assessment mechaism just isn’t very appropriate to the kinds of risks we encounter in the modern world.
The anthrax-in-the-mail event of late 2001 killed 5 Americans & caused a run on Cipro. The influenza pandemic that same year killed 37,000 Americans (like it does every year), yet 100,000 doses of flu vaccine went unsold (like they do almost every year).
More people died in car crashes in the greater Washington DC area than were killed by those 2 nut-case snipers during the same period.
Yet where was the news media’s attention, and where was the public’s? People are not smart about this stuff.
Head to a Rust Belt city like Buffalo or Rochester, and you’ll often hear people justiify their continued residence in those areas by comparing the effects of the local climate to geophysical disasters one could encounter elsewhere. “It’s easy to shovel away a blizzard, but you can’t shovel away a tornado/hurricane/earthquake.”
That’s true, but there’s far more to consider than the climate. People mentally weigh the risk of potential disasters in the area against such factors as overall weather, quality of life, economic conditions, and living in a community where there’s a greater percentage of like-minded people (creative class/urban hipsters, elderly, Republicans, and so on).
A young adult from Buffalo who moves to … oh, Los Angeles, might consider the ratio of LA benefits versus risks/shortcomings to be greater than Buffalo’s benefits versus risks/shortcomings. To them, enduring traffic, expensive housing and earthquakes is worth it when they consider the benefits of life in Southern California.
Yea I guess the media does hype it up to much. I watch the news and see all the houses torn apart and the ground cracked in two and I think those things happen a lot. I live in florida and the last major hurricane was Andrew in the early 90’s and I feel pretty safe living here even though there is a possibility of another one occuring and I guess thats how you guys feel living where you live.
Many times, it is the susceptibility to natural disasters that make an area attractive. River deltas, flood plains and areas near volcanoes have fertile soil for growing crops. A bay may have been created by geologic faults.