3 ms·

> etc. You can't just name three places in a very large country and then say 'etc'. There are plenty of places with much lower risks of natural disasters. Tha

> etc. You can't just name three places in a very large country and then say 'etc'. There are plenty of places with much lower risks of natural disasters. That's a big part of the reason my family lives in central New York.

dsr_ 9y ago
Big snowstorms every year. Tornadoes many years.
- JshWright 9y ago
  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).
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    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.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      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.
herewulf 9y ago
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.
- JshWright 9y ago
  That's an easily solved problem though... don't buy a house in a floodplain... I live in the hills southeast of Syracuse.

dsr_ 9y ago

Big snowstorms every year. Tornadoes many years.

JshWright 9y ago
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).
- dsr_ 9y ago
  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.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    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.

herewulf 9y ago

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.

JshWright 9y ago
That's an easily solved problem though... don't buy a house in a floodplain... I live in the hills southeast of Syracuse.