One of the common themes to come out of the "Katrina" threads is that New Orleans was over developed given it's environmental circumstances (eg hurricane corridor, below sea level) but when a place is your home, and is all you know it's hard to walk away even though you know that disaster looms. HodgedUp pointed out that I live in a city dominated by volcanic cones (dormant, phew) And others live in LA which is on a fault line People in the pacific are fighting rising sea levels which threaten their entire islands, and I believe the eskimos have similar issues Chicago seems to freeze it's poor and elderly every winter and then bake them every summer - if the media is to be believed So, what hazards do you happily overlook because your home is your home and nowhere else will do?
yes, agreed sarah...the united states could at anytime have a natural disaster occur in many places, i've found alot of the people (i personally know) who aren't contributing to the relief funds are the one's who would first come out and ask for a handout if it were them. its easy to say, they get what they deserve for living there, but we could all be in that same position someday too.
Cape Town isn't threatened by natural things like tornadoes, hurricanes, etc, so I'd have to say it's the crime (we have the highest rape rate in the world and South Africa is considered one of the most dangerous countries to live in outside of a warzone) and that we have a nuclear reactor sitting on the top of a potential faultline...
Earthquakes We had a little one (7.1) back 1989... The Loma Prieta earthquake. I remember a lot of the houses on my block got messed up and people camped outside in their tents for a while. A few years before that we had a flood and lost just about everything. I remember my dads car floated a few blocks away into someone's house. That was all in Northern California now I'm in SoCal and it's mostly Earthquakes and wind storms.... but nothing to bad.... yet.
So what's the point we should drive out there now? Since these things are simply inevitable, the best thing the people and local government could do is to be prepared enough whenever these disasters come. If you can't stop them, then pretty sure, we can minimize the effect if we just have proper and enough planning/preparation.
The point is that some people are scornful of the people who made New Orleans their home but despite whatever flaws our home town may have we stay - because it's our home.
Same as Hodgedup, lots of Tornadoes, although I am thankful we have less the central Oklahoma who is probably the worst place in the U.S. for them. They are scary, but, it's like 3 months out of the year.
Also, I forgot to mention it, but the area in blue in Texas is known for it’s wild ravenous monkey attacks. I should point out, the very small area in green, that in the early 80s I was personally plagued by attacks from a much older bully named Michael, but there have been no reported cases of him in almost 2 decades.
I went to college at University of Oklahoma and ended up living near OKC for almost ten years. Oklahoma warts can be incredibly devastating. That was a housing development about five miles from my home. If you were driving down the freeway you could look left, and then right and there was simply nothing there but rubble. It looked like a giant had walked through with a lawn mower. It's no joke when they talk about pieces of wood piercing just about anything. As hodgedup mentioned there was a smallish Northern California quake that I also got to experience. It caused damage over a 100 mile wide stretch of land. You didn't hear much about Santa Cruz back then because of the problems in San Francisco and Oakland....but we basically lost our entire downtown. Being that it was somewhat isolated it was several months that you had to go through an escorted convoy to get out of town due to landslides on the mountain roads.
Earthquakes are the problem people think of down here, but I also think about the big fire here two years ago. People in other parts of the country thought all of San Diego was burning, just from how the news portrayed it. Felt that way sometimes, since that fire came within about 3 miles of my mother's house, about 5 from my inlaws and about 7 miles from where I lived at the time.
I live in probably the safest part of country. Only a few smaller tornadoes that rip a few things up but nothing major like the normal ones out west.
I saw some of the fault first hand - 20 foot gaps that were split wide open. one lane in Scotts Valley was gone - it went down the cliff (back road) Houses split in 2, Highway 17 had 4 inch drops every 100 feet (I wasn't supposed to be driving on it??) Down town had its damage, but those were mostly old single story type buildings. I actually missed the earthquake (another story) but I got down there about 1-1/2 weeks later.
luckily the area I live in illinois has been pretty safe the last couple of years. at most we had like 2 1/2 feet of snow in the winter, and 100 degree weather in the summer, flooding in the lower areas of the city, and we miss the tornadoes because i live along the mississippi river which somehow manages to save us everytime! everything has been manageable to this point
Yeah Im looking at moving to Chicago so I had better get used to the cold. Actually, last year we got 4 feet of snow here in Reno. That sucked.
Be glad it's just snow. Oklahoma would get a tiny bit of snow, but mostly just freezing rain. It can be gorgeous when everything is covered in a layer of ice, but it's crazy dangerous to drive on....or even walk on for that matter. One of my friends broke his hip slipping on the ice and he was only twenty-something. I am so glad to be back near San Francisco where it's pretty much 50-70 degrees all year round.