In terms of natural disaster, which U.S. state and which foreign nation are safest (i.e., least vulnerable to hurricanes, floods, etc.)?
It’s not a State but the intermountain regions of Washington and Oregon are pretty stable
https://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/safest_places_from_natural_disasters.aspx
I’ll let you find the state with the least number of dots yourself.
Those dots just represent metro areas, so it wouldn’t really show which state is safer.
Honestly, that’s kind of like the “if a tree falls…” thing. Sure, “natural disasters” happen out in the middle of nowhere. But if nobody’s there, who cares? Are they really THAT “disastrous”? Sure, I wouldn’t have wanted to be around the Tunguska event, but I don’t think it was a disaster.
Your risk of getting killed in an earthquake out in the middle of nowhere is going to be less than if you’re surrounded by high rises. At the same time though, if something bad does happen, you’re kind of on your own. I think it comes down to how resourceful and prepared you are.
I’m saying that the number of dots is in not correlated with number of natural disasters. so counting up the dots on the list won’t tell you anything.
Alright, raw occurrences. Then we can deduce, I suppose, that WA looks pretty safe. But I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near there during the next “big one,” or if Mt. Rainier goes off. Yikes. At least that crap can’t happen where I live.
Umm…EXCUSE ME?!?!?
Would you count susceptibility to drought? That might include more places.
Depends on how finely you define natural disaster, A summer heat wave in the Midwest always generates news reports of people who died from the heat. What about winter blizzards, do they count as natural disasters?
Big Island of Hawaii several miles north of Hilo (where my home is).
Hurricane? No major ( or even minor) hurricanes in recorded history, (Hundreds of years.)
Tsunami? Eighty foot cliff above the ocean 3/4 mile from home.
Volcanic eruption? Mauna Kea (behind home) last erupted 5000 years ago. Its terrain would block any lava flow from Mauna Loa.
Tornado? Terrain is too mountainous.
Flooding? Island is made from very porous volcanic rock. Even after an historic 26 inch rainfall in 24 hours, there was no standing water on property.
Drought? Last year 185 inches of rain, Year before 235’.
Earthquake? Was here for a major 7.2 earthquake. So what? The ground shook violently for almost a minute, but there was no damage to home.
Food shortage? Year round growing season. Fertile soil with plenty of rain for irrigating crops.
Assuming those volcanoes continue to mind their manners, your particular plot of ground on the Big Island seems fairly safe. (I’m familiar with that area, and know it to be also quite beautiful - in my admittedly outside-the-mainstream view, among the best locations in Hawaii).
But the OP specified a state, and taken as a whole Hawaii probably doesn’t qualify as the safest. Among other possibilities, there’s the threat of a megatsunami. This could come from a seismic event elsewhere (e.g. Alaska), or could be “home-brewed”.
One scenario is that the southern flank of Mauna Loa slumps off, with many dozens of cubic miles of rock and soil sliding into the ocean. The resulting wave could be hundreds of feet high (the extreme estimates run to 1000m). Such a wave would cause catastrophic damage thousands of miles away; closer to home, it would pretty much erase Honolulu from the map.
Ohio
Any place you can quickly flee to Canada? It just feels like it ought to be safer up there.
Well, your feelings are less likely to be hurt in Canada.
I moved to Santa Fe a couple of years ago, which I now realize is one of the few places that is out of range of both hurricanes and (probably) N Korea. It’s in the lowest risk category for natural disasters (it’s the small dark green circle NE of the large pale green circle that is Albuquerque.)
Climate change presents some risk to water supplies, but at 7000’ with mountains nearby it probably has more secure water supplies than many desert areas.
Or they could do something really dumb at Los Alamos, but it’s 30 miles away.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-federal-nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal
So, I plan to die either of old age or base jumping.
Aren’t those areas prone to the massive wild fires that occur throughout much of The West?
Doesn’t New Mexico also routinely have massive wildfires?
Cacti and sand don’t burn well.
No one lives in a State. Many States are huge with northern portions differing greatly from southern areas. No one really even lives in a city. People live in neighborhoods in a city. If your neighborhood is near the river that flows through the city, your home could be flooded, but someone who lives in the same city far from the river would be unaffected.
We do have forests, and dorvann is right that we do seem to have rather a lot of fires in proportion to the amount of forest we have.