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I think about stuff like this sometimes but where can you go within the United States ? Move south or Midwest and you deal with tornadoes and hurricanes that can kill you or rip your homes off. How about East/North-East ? Low chance of Tornadoes but then be ready to get hit with Superstorms (Sandy anyone ?). If these things don't get you, be ready to deal with shit load of Snowstorms and blizzards. If nothing else, flooding will get you. So take your pick.

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Yea, there aren't many places on this earth that don't see some sort of natural disaster. Maybe we'll all be living in the UK/Ireland, they don't seem to get hit by much.

We get tsunamis[1] and tornados[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunamis_affecting_the_British...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/24/weather.world1

I used to live in northwest Arkansas, about 45 minutes south of Joplin, Missouri. My home had a steel tornado shelter dug into the ground. We used it several times a year when the sirens went off.

Tornadoes in the UK are a freak phenomenon. In the central and southern US, they are a regular part of life. The point being that people outside of Tornado Alley don't really get how common tornadoes are in that part of North America. In the fall and spring, they are an inevitability, along with the most intense thunderstorms in the world.

Ok, really stupid and ignorant question:

Tornadoes happen mostly where there are no trees, right? That's why they happen in dust bowls, if I'm not mistaken.

How expensive and practical would it be to re-forest populated areas to reduce the likelihood of tornadoes? Would that work? If so, have there been any serious plans to do that?

You seem to assume that the inverse correlation of tornadoes and trees is because trees prevent tornadoes, rather than alternatives like the presence of tornadoes either directly making things inhospitable for trees or being a product of other factors which make things inhospitable for trees.

That assumption is based on experience and reasoning:

I've been in many wide open places without trees, and have experienced much higher winds there than in places which have lots of trees -- for example, forest vs golf course. The trees seem to do a good job of blocking and reducing wind. It would make sense that they could do a good job of at least reducing the number of tornadoes in tornado-prone lands.

I'm sure tornadoes uproot trees as well, but I am not sure whether tornadoes are common or even possible where there are lots of tree around - such as in a forest.

I would love to be corrected if I'm wrong. And it would be helpful if the questions I raised in my previous post could be answered.

That's not really how it works. Tornadoes can form anywhere that enough warm humid air hits enough cold dry air. And that happens a lot in the Midwest/Plains region during certain times of year. Tornadoes would form there even if there were forests. The trees might stop the classic funnel cloud from touching down completely, but it won't stop the storm.

Some places in the UK do get flooding, but in most places you should be fine.

In general you are correct - although there was a tsunami ~8000 years ago caused by huge undersea landslides off Norway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

Hurricanes and snowstorms are predicted days, if not weeks in advance. The scary thing about earthquakes is that they can hit any time with very little warning.

> Hurricanes and snowstorms are predicted days, if not weeks in advance.

And, in the case of hurricanes in the US, still both kill more people and cause more property damage than earthquakes, both in aggregate and individually among the major instances of each class.

If we buried more power lines snowstorms wouldn't be a problem at all (and we don't bury more of them because it would be expensive compared to the benefit).

Even when a big storm hits and exceeds the snow removal capacity of a region, it doesn't suddenly expose hundreds of thousands of people to danger, it just makes it less safe to drive (something individuals have control over) and reduces the effectiveness of emergency services.

The last of those likely has a measurable impact.

Of course it does but in a given year the typical person accesses emergency services 0 times.

That's almost wrong. There are 44.5 (edit: .44) visits to the ER per capita per year in the United States (admittedly, those are likely biased to some subset of the population). Of those visits, roughly 2 million result in urgent care admission and 16 million in hospital admission. So roughly 5% of the country has an ER visit that results in their being admitted to the hospital in some state. There's no quick way to tell what effect delayed visits would have on that but it seems like it could be significant.

[source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/emergency-department.htm]

It's 44.5 visits per 100 persons (per capita means per person).

I'm sure there would be a measurable effect from diminished access to the ER and various other services. I just think it will be small. Looking through some of the links from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Blizzards_in_the_Unit...

You do get more deaths than I thought. Many of them are attributable to carbon monoxide poisoning (totally preventable). Other major causes are cardiac arrests while shoveling and traffic accidents.

I misspoke, 44 visits per capita would be ludicrous (related: I'm curious how many hours are spent in some kind of medical practice per capita)

Thanks for following up, perhaps I'm overestimating the degradation to the ability to receive ems. Some quick searching didn't pull up any studies done on this, so perhaps it's not significant.

Sorry if that came across harsh, I was trying to correct the conversation, not be critical or snide. I figured it was a typoish thing.

No worries, there was just a bit of embarrassment and no bad feelings.

This article seems to talk about increased stress on the cardiovascular system as a result of cold, http://www.livescience.com/42568-cold-winter-weather-related...

With 4,600 deaths being delayed as a result of people leaving cold areas. This seems to suggest that a lot of people die sooner due to this?

I'm still curious about whether access to medical service harms people but can't find anyone talking about it...

Great Lakes Region is just fine. Don't really have tornados in Ohio that often (you're thinking like, Kansas or Oklahoma). No flooding really, no wildfires, blizzards only once in awhile (and with global warming soon to be never). Plus you aren't going to have any droughts to worry about because #GreatLakes.

Wouldn't be so certain about blizzards. Warming increases the amount of moisture in the atmosphere during the cold months, producing more blizzards. My only fear about living in the Great Lakes is that we may end up snowed under before our ready access to fresh water makes a difference in terms of climate change preparedness.

References:

http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2013/02/global_wa...

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/future-of-epic-blizzards-...

http://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Threats-to-Wildlife/Global-Warmi...

There's a difference between earthquake and tornado/superstorm/flooding/etc. in that earthquake will strike you out of the blue with literally NO warnings before, but those other disasters at least give you a time-window to prepare.

Some people just don't like getting surprised!

Colorado. Other than blizzards and wildfires in forested areas, disasters here are minimal. Blizzards aren't bad, because they are few and far between and the dry air and average above freezing temperatures mean a quick melt/sublimation afterwards.

Just don't think too much about the super volcano seething under the ground in neighboring Wyoming.

More realistically, Colorado gets severe thunderstorms and tornadoes all the time -- like the one that killed two in Limon in 1990.

Go southwest if you don't want any natural disasters. No hurricanes, tornadoes, snow, earthquakes, etc.

Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas are pretty far from those issues.

Due in large part to its size, Texas is actually the only state in the United States that's susceptible to every type of natural hazard.

Source: Worked in marketing for a P&C firm, compliance wouldn't let us publish a blog post on the topic.

> Texas is actually the only state in the United States that's susceptible to every type of natural hazard.

Texas has zero active (or even merely dormant) volcanoes, so that's at least a little bit of an overstatement.

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