Is there a middle ground? My kids went as part of a team to help people rebuild after Katrina and one of the folks they met was rebuilding their house but building it as a boat. They had re-done the foundation so that the house rested on it, and its sewer connection was just the house pipe inset into the city pipe (so it could easily lift out). That, 15' of chain to allow the house to float above the foundation and central concrete and iron pillar which was essentially the keel.
I thought of them reading about Harvey and I am wondering if they will show up on the news at some point.
I compared it a bit to my efforts to insure my house remains intact and upright in the event of an earthquake (the 'likely' disaster where I live).
There certainly is a middle ground - however why stay in the same place and expect a different future? New Orleans isn't that much more prepared for another flood. Houston re-did the entire bayou system about 5 years ago and yet here we are.
People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind.
To take it a step further, the area in which I come from has been hit hard with economic and social disasters. Even though factories are closing down and heroin deaths are rising each day, people choose to stay here. Family and other social networks are a big part of it I think, as someone said downthread.
I bolted as soon as I could to gain employment and the resources of a bigger city. It still boggles my mind that more people my age don't, as things seem to be getting worse rather than better. But it's home, it's familiar, it's comforting, no matter what issues may loom. I had cousins refuse to leave post-Katrina New Orleans for similar reasons.
Sorry, just a comparison to your line of thinking from a different angle, slightly related.
Well, they really didn't "redo the entire bayou system". They considered alternatives and chose the most politically correct one for the parties involved. They knew it wasn't enough for something like Harvey but they didn't think there would be a Harvey( a supposed "500-year event") anytime soon. Black Swan anyone?
AndrewKemendo says: "People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind."
But where do you go to be safe from disasters?
California - earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, torrential rains, rip currents, and even volcanoes
Gulf Coast - hurricanes
Midwest - tornadoes
etc.
Slate Magazine set out to find where you could live free of potential disasters. See:
"Slate's "America's Best Place to Avoid Death Due to Natural Disaster": the area in and around Storrs, Conn., home to the University of Connecticut..."
Read the article to see if you're ready to make the move.
Dayton tops the list for least natural disaster prone. Similar with Southern Maryland. Denver is pretty high on the list and Seattle seems pretty safe too.
There are plenty of places to go.
For some reason we seem to love to build massive cities on disaster areas. I'm looking at you SF, LA and NYC.
But hey fuck it, lets just continue being bad at statistics and assume that because a natural disaster happened recently it won't happen again for a long time (the idea of a "500 year" storm is insane).
If the Yellowstone super volcano erupts, it doesn't really matter where in the northern hemisphere you live - in fact life on _most_ of the earth's surface is going to suck for a few decades after that.
Seattle has valve nearby. If anyone ever buys some expensive gem and jams it into exotic machinery.. my bet is on these guys. So very dangerous place to live in..
Upstate New York has some pretty terrible flooding. I don't know where you consider "central New York" (it is -- after all -- a large state). The corridor along I-86 (Elmira, Corning, Hornell, etc), where I lived for a few years, has built up extensive flood controls to prevent future damage. A lesson hard learned from multiple severe floods. Then there was bad flooding just a few years ago in the Mohawk River valley centered around Herkimer.
Probably just the tip of the iceberg in a state that sees a lot of annual rainfall.
Tiny tornadoes... nowhere even close to the scale and frequency of midwestern twisters.
Snow? A minor inconvenience, at worst. It's a frequent enough occurrence that municipalities are we set up to deal with it. If you don't have snow tires, there will be maybe 24-48 hours per year that you won't want to go driving (with snow tires, that timeframe is an order of magnitude less).
The difference between a tiny tornado and a big tornado is immaterial when your house is in the path.
There were at least four times in the twenty years that I lived in upstate NY that snowstorms caused power outages and impassable roads at the same time.
You can't just name one place as safe from natural disasters and then explain that the two natural disasters that they get there don't count.
Tornado threat may be sufficiently mitigated just by digging a [dry] hole in the ground, and getting into it whenever the sirens go off. If you have enough money, you can bolt a steel box to your foundation and hide in that instead.
We can actually build structures that can withstand [the most common] tornadoes, without adding too much to the cost of construction. Basically, monolithic concrete shell structures over inflatable forms are effectively "tornado proof", without additional engineering.
The nasty natural disasters in the Midwest are not just blizzards, but freezing rain storms. A coating of ice an inch thick on everything is guaranteed to take down trees and power lines, and make all roads completely impassable. You get up to a week without civilization. For example, if your furnace catches fire, you can call 911, and later find out that the first fire truck they sent out slid off the road into a ditch on the way to your house, and the guys that finally showed up two hours later were the second truck, sent over from the next township (true story). On the Great Plains, it's drought and brushfires. You get to spend a season watching everything turn brown, and then your town burns because some jackoff threw a cigarette butt out of his window on the highway, or because lightning struck the wrong spot.
Thanks to modern meteorology, tornadoes are just much less a threat than they used to be. They might pick off a person here or there every season, but when they do, there will always be neighbors around ready to help. They just don't wipe out an entire city, leaving everyone essentially on their own, because they are all (sometimes literally) in exactly the same boat.
And that's exactly why I am comfortable living in an area where the major natural disaster threats are tornadoes and flash floods.
> People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind.
Social connections, networks that enable employment, and a lack of serious financial reserves (which will always be true for ~50% of people) are the main reasons.
And no area is immune to disaster and lacks challenges.
The "low natural disaster" areas have a total lack of warning before disaster strikes, heavy snowfall that can cripple normal services, deserts with poisonous creatures, or some combination of those three.
For the most part, to be perfectly honest, as long as you are capable of picking up and moving on short notice...hurricane country is actually safer due to the amount of warning you get.
Central/eastern Europe is pretty good as far as disasters go. The most likely thing to happen is flooding from the local river and majority of them have designated flood areas. After that it's just heat waves and occasional freezing days. (Mostly affects elderly) No wildlife to worry about. Snow is common enough that a lot of people know to switch to winter tyres and roads are salted and cleared.
There's about 1/10th of the region that was in a war zone in the last 70 years (Yugoslavia, Eastern Ukraine), and those wars didn't really concern neighboring countries.
Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke :p
There's about 1/10th of the region that was in a war zone in the last 70 years (Yugoslavia, Eastern Ukraine), and those wars didn't really concern neighboring countries.
That 70 years (which is debatable!) maybe the longest period of peace in the area in recorded history. Possibly the peace of 1871 to 1914 is the only other alternative.
Here's a list of conflicts in Europe since 1945[1]. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union there were some conflicts. For example, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was in 1968 and was a reasonable major conflict.
(Note that I'm not claiming that Eastern/Central Europe is unique in this! Mostly densely populated areas are similar, and Western Europe scores only slightly better if you don't count revolutionary movements within the counties).
Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke
Yes, indeed this is true. As I note above the 1945-1990 period was very stable except for Czechoslovakia invasion of course. They were pretty lucky in Poland in the 1980s too.
After '90, if you discount all the Russia-provoked conflicts, there's basically only ex-Yugoslavia as far as conflicts are concerned. Every other event on that list would basically count as a normal day in Baltimore :)
You can never predict the future but I'm willing to bet that the following countries will be peaceful for at least the next 20 years:
- Czech Republic
- Slovakia
- Poland
- Hungary
- Slovenia
- Croatia
- Romania
- Albania
Places like the Czech Republic will probably be among the safest places on Earth, both regarding economic, political stability and possible outside aggression, for the next half a century, in my opinion.
On the other hand, people were saying similar things before WW1 :D
Hmm. I'm not sure that is a great way of looking at it while Russia is still there.
Poland
I'm not sure about that. The Kaliningrad Oblast is a real problem - historically oblasts haven't been very stable politically.
Generally speaking though, I think most of those countries are NATO members (not sure about Albania?). That means that if any NATO member country is attacked they will all be dragged in.
If the US got dragged into a war on the Korean peninsular then I'm not sure Putin could resist the temptation of Estonia or Latvia. And I'm not sure what would happen then.
Or who knows what will happen in (NATO Member) Turkey. Three years ago they nearly got in a shooting war with Russia. Now they are good friends.. at the moment.
I've spent some great times in Central Europe, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the area. But that doesn't mean there aren't real, significant risks.
Some storms too that break trees and take down shingles. I think the most common death by nature might be getting hit by a tree during or after a storm.
While, that is, the pretty regular small earthquakes in the Vrancea county that borders Transylvania, release the pressure! At least, I assume that's better than a long period of ominous silence - I'm not a geologist!
> People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind.
There was a period where the banking regulator for New Zealand was going to force all the major banks to move their IT shops from Wellington to Christchurch because Wellington was at too high a risk of a natural disaster.
A couple of years later, an earthquake on a hitherto-unknown fault flattened Christchurch.
You uh... don't know too many people from New Orleans do you? Ask them to move and they will look at you as if you'd grown another head. Maybe moving elsewhere is easy for you, upper-middle-class person with marketable skills and no loyalties. But to them it's like saying "Hey, why don't you just walk away from everyone and everything, the people and sights and smells and sounds, you cherish? You won't? What are you, insane?"
It's more than just irrationality. I've never been there, but from what I've seen New Orleans has a unique culture that you can't find anywhere else. It's not irrational to want to be part of that culture, even if there's the occasional risk of flooding.
Makes sense not to move if you own a home. Property will be hardest to sell right after disaster.
Let alone moving means you need to convince your Family and their other family and their other family's family to move etc. Or go it alone but ties like that are strong.
Is everyone on HN moving to their optimal place regardless of friends or family considerations?
Your current house is a sunk cost. I have sold a house at a loss and moved to a different city. I didn't like it, but moving was the right thing so I did.
The vast majority of emergency situations that a person is going to face isn't going to require something so drastic as moving.
Most people are not going to have to worry about a hurricane or a flood. Most people have more mundane problems, that are still potentially life altering.
There is a really interesting episode of the UK show Grand Designs that follows someone in a flood prone area who built a house that essentially rests within its own drydock structure. Worth a watch if you find this sort of thing interesting and the show is fascinating in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16scx81p2w4
We spent nearly 9 months house hunting in Scotland - I was genuinely shocked to find out that new houses were often in fairly high risk areas for flooding. Trying to find somewhere rural in the right area with low flooding risk and low risk from mining related problems and with decent internet access was non-trivial.
Depending on where this is, you can think of it as generations of people have already picked out and settled in the naturally safe spots. What's left then are the less desirable, potentially riskier locations.
I live in a place where other than a 3-4 days of average annual disruption due to snow, the only real natural disaster risks are associated by poorly engineered and maintained sewers backing up.
I find it bizarre that I've spent millions over the years providing disaster recovery and resiliency for relatively unimportant things, but the combo of a devastating hurricane in Texas and major earthquake in Northern California could essentially trigger a economic calamity.
its sewer connection was just the house pipe inset
into the city pipe
That connection isn't too bad, but I'm curious how they dealt with water supply and (if they have it) natural gas? Those are much harder to make flexible.
I thought of them reading about Harvey and I am wondering if they will show up on the news at some point.
I compared it a bit to my efforts to insure my house remains intact and upright in the event of an earthquake (the 'likely' disaster where I live).