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Living with disaster
Posted at: Oct/27/2010 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Perspectives,
Seems like a strange subject, but please stay with me on this. I live in southern California, specifically in the San Diego area. A while back I was on the telephone conference with a business associate back east and the conversation got around to where we each lived. My associate upon learning where I lived was surprised anyone would want to live in southern California “with all the earthquakes.” I have not always lived in the San Diego area. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and experienced devastating wind storms, mud slides, winter ice storms, flooding, and the humbling effects of watching Mount St. Helens erupt. For a while I lived in Hawaii and witnessed firsthand what a typhoon and its related tidal surge could do to Honolulu and Waikiki. Nope, I am not the proverbial “bad penny” with a dark cloud following me. I took a little time recently to compile all the natural disaster types I can recall hearing of happening sometime during my lifetime. 1. Super typhoon 2. Typhoon 3. Tornado 4. Hurricanes 5. Tropical storm 6. Monsoonal rain 7. Hail 8. Drought 9. Flood 10. Blizzard 11. Avalanche 12. Landslide 13. Mudslide 14. Volcano 15. Dust storm 16. Tidal wave 17. Tsunami 18. Tidal storm surge 19. Earthquake 20. Wildfire Quite a list isn’t it. The internet is a great place to do a little disaster research. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. As a child I can still recall the Columbus Day storm of 1962. The Portland Oregon area was hit with a storm packing sustained winds of 90 mph and gusts up to 120 mph. Billions of board feet of timber were toppled. The ensuing rains caused mudslides and brought the Willamette River to well over flood stage. Most of the electrical distribution system in Northwest Oregon had to be rebuilt from the ground up and we were without power for more than a week in most areas. Again, I promise you…I am not one of those characters with the dark cloud following them around. Let’s get back to that list of 20 disasters shown above. I am not an expert in meteorology or tectonic forces, but I know that in general terms the surface of our planet is a pretty dynamic place to live. Just looking at North America for the last 50 years can be an interesting study in disasters. Taking out a map and a wide tipped marker can be an interesting exercise. Start by blotting out areas of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys for their devastating floods. From Chicago to Buffalo you can cover up large tracks of America adjoining the Great Lakes due to devastating ice and snow storms. There are of course the hurricanes that periodically wreck havoc from Texas, to Florida, and up the eastern sea board. We should not forget the droughts and heat waves that have in recent year destroyed crops and killed many from northern Georgia to Virginia. Nearly every spring there are bands of tornados that sweep through Tennessee and Kentucky. Moving east there are the Fall tornados destroying property from central Texas to Minnesota. Much of this same region is hit by drought and dust storm conditions every 30-50. There is no argument about the dangers associated with the blizzards of the Rocky Mountains north into Montana. From Arizona to California to Wyoming fast moving winds drive wildfires that consume nearly everything in their path. The Pacific coast states are all periodically hit by earth quakes. In Oregon and Washington there is of course heavy rains leading to mud slides and lest we not forget…there is Mount St. Helens erupting every 200 years. I went through all of that really fast, so I apologize if I have missed out on your most significant memory of a natural disaster. My guess is that if you look at your map you are going to see that you have blocked out virtually the entire map. If there is an area unscathed on your map…it is probably pretty arid or remote making human habitation virtually untenable. I have great confidence that with a little research you could repeat this process for virtually any continent and come up with similar results. There is an obvious conclusion to these blacked out maps. The surface of our planet is a very dynamic place and to my knowledge there is no place on the planet that is both immune to disaster and suitable for human life. If this discussion has scared you, I apologize. The truth is that relative to our home planet we are very small and have to just learn to live with the challenges we are handed. It really comes down to your ability to get to sleep at night. If great sunshine and beautiful beaches are your style, you should consider southern California provided anxiety over the occasional unannounced earthquake does not bother you significantly. If the southern lifestyle is your pleasure and you’re not opposed to evacuating every few years because of an approaching hurricane you need to consider living near the Gulf Coast. Hurricanes are predictable so you get to watch them approaching on the evening news. Surprisingly, there are actually winners in this mess. There is a group of people called actuaries. These are the people who analyze all the disaster data and can calculate risk for the insurance companies. Despite all the complaining we hear from the insurance industry after each disaster…they continue to make loads of money by analyzing this data. I guess if you learn enough about anything you can turn it into profit. Beyond the actuaries, there are the rest of us. You could use the knowledge garnered from your blacked out map to become a fatalist believing that you life is doomed, but there is no fun in that. Make the choice to live where you want to live and with the risk of the type of disaster you are most able to not think about when going to bed at night. As long as you have a few gallons of fresh water stored away you will be fine.
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