Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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I dunno, I re-read the beginning and I didn't see anything about the points I raised. I think your point that overzealous people who as you put it:

begin by shopping for ballistic vests and night vision goggles; they would be better served by grabbing a fire extinguisher, some bottled water, and then putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund.

is right on point, but IMO that just says - hey don't be insane.

Literally right now, my good friends are being rescued from a rooftop in Houston. No number of bottles of water in their basement or generators are going to help them. They are lucky in that they have some discretionary funds and Flood insurance, but more likely than not (if history repeats itself) they wont get fully paid out for what they lost.

What they should have done is learned when to move or when to stay by: 1. Not buying a house in Houston and then 2. Gotten out well before it was imminent.

Small scale common adversities like you are talking about can get critical really quickly. All those preparations, other than just having savings, is just making you slightly more comfortable and buy you a little bit of time so that you can make a bigger plan. Good, but insufficient and gives you a false sense of security. Again, these are things I've seen over and over.

Planning for the range of disasters from a month of unemployment and TEOTWAWKI is the same basic mental change, not just a full basement and bank account.

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.

> 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.

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.

To be honest, the legal environment in Central/Eastern Europe in regards to speech would be a greater threat to me than the environment.

Central/eastern Europe is pretty good as far as disasters go.

Natural disasters, perhaps.

That region doesn't have a great record in terms of political stability, and often has the bad luck of being in the middle of a warzone though.

This a humongous generalization.

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.

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

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

if you discount all the Russia-provoked conflicts

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.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was relatively bloodless - compare with 1956 in Hungary.

Yes, good point. I can't believe I forgot that!

Romanian villages and small cities have problems with flooding almost yearly. And there's also the risk of earthquakes.

If you're in Transylvania in a non-flood zone you should be in one of the safest regions on Earth, as far as natural disasters are concerned.

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.

That's why I walk on the middle of the road - people have been killed on the sidewalks!

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.

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.

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.

That is true it's a sunk cost. But still gains made on the capital can be high after the disaster. It's like holding stocks after the GFC.

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?"

You won't find argument from me that people are irrational friend.

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.

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:

"Where To Hide From Mother Nature"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/200...

Their conclusion:

"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).

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/media/top-10-safest-us-cities-from-n...

Seattle is safe? Aren't they under impending doom from the Cascade fault[1]?

[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/cascadia-subduction-zone-ea...

Along with the giant volcano to the East. :)

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.

I meant Mt Rainier.

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..

> 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.

Big snowstorms every year. Tornadoes many years.

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.

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.

That's an easily solved problem though... don't buy a house in a floodplain...

I live in the hills southeast of Syracuse.

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.

    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.

They make flexible lines for both.

IMO the middle ground is to move!

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.

Amsterdam has entire neighborhoods of floating houses. Not houseboats, but house-shaped houses that float. See:

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/06/the-floating-houses-of-...

> Literally right now, my good friends are being rescued from a rooftop in Houston. No number of bottles of water in their basement or generators are going to help them.

Some of this outcome is a direct result of conforming to commercially-fabricated social pressure. In this particular case, floodplain maps are publicly and freely available, so anyone can build structures that rise well above the highest-projected floods.

Except that developers don't want to have to build on top of stilts or as tethered floating structures. It decreases the available pool of customers looking for a pre-packaged vision of what they "should" buy, and it's more expensive than "conventional" building designs.

This illustrates that for some, a preparedness mindset can include thinking for oneself and outside social norms, with the aim of avoiding placing themselves in a situation that calls for preparedness to begin with. Teaching youngsters how to deconstruct the marketing that militates against this kind of mindset to externalize a future cost upon them in order to lift an immediate profit into the commercial entities standing behind those forces, can passively preempt many preparedness scenarios.

The classic Queenslander house is built up high so it can stay cool and probably also good for a flooding scenario.

It all depends upon how they are built. I remember a number of Queenslanders ended up floating away because the waters went above floor level. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-02/floodwaters-sweep-away....

They tend to not do very well in cyclones unless the builder has been very careful about tying the stumps to the floor to the walls to the roof.

That's fascinating, thanks for the info; the Texas coast has some houses with a similar design [1]. While some use wood stilts, some are going into full fortified designs [2]. Even further afield, using principles established with invisibility cloaking research might offer even more protection in the future [3]. If plasma gasification-produced slag-based pozzolanic concrete can be proven safe and efficacious, then the pillars could literally be partially built out of garbage, co-generating energy and rock wool at the same time.

[1] http://pictures.escapia.com/PTARES/1866960517.jpg

[2] http://www.texasgulfcoastonline.com/News/tabid/86/ctl/Articl...

[3] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14829-invisibility-cl...

Fun fact I met the author of #3. Nice guy.

Those are common along the Carolina coast (which gets hit with Atlantic hurricanes). They're supposed to be built with strapping that connects the roof to the walls, the walls to the floor joists, and then to the posts. Building up like this gets you above the storm surge and gives you a place to park the car (you'll lose the car and the lawnmower, but that's minor compared to losing the house).

They're also supposed to have hurricane-rated glazing. One thing that destroys homes is when an opening gets made, allowing the wind inside. So having strong glass (or boarding-up) is a big deal.

Developers are just responding to market signals. The underlying problem in the U.S. is that the federal government backstops 98% of flood insurance policies and does not charge the actuarial risk price. This government subsidy gives people incentives to overbuild and underprotect property in flood-prone areas.

I like the idea that un-socializing flood risk pools might align incentives better... but my guess is that's not what would happen. Instead, by and large, people would estimate risk the way most humans do, which is to say "badly," and would value the premium money more than protection from events whose cycle is long enough that they seem like freak occurrences to some. If that's the case -- if that's been the case in the past -- then putting the government as the cause is putting the cart before the horse. It isn't that the market bent to the shape it's in because of the government, it's that the government adapted to the shape of the market and provided the socialized form of insurance that people were most amenable to.

Exactly. To this day I don't understand how building on a slab is even considered insurable unless you're basically on a hilltop.

Sounds like a good case for better building regulations and less reliance on hand-wavy free-market woo

> What they should have done is learned when to move or when to stay by: 1. Not buying a house in Houston and then 2. Gotten out well before it was imminent

I'm not sure what degree of freedom you're supposing they have, but not everyone is able to uproot their life on some survivalist kick. Plenty of people have their roots and networks where they are, so "just don't live there" isn't a universally applicable "fix".

I've been fortunate enough to be able to move to a place ideally suited to my needs (and as I don't need much I suppose I could move on relatively short notice if needed) but even I recognize that not everyone can afford to follow suit.

You're missing his point. He's not saying he expects everyone to do this. He's just saying when to move or not move is often more important than any other considerations.

Note that he included as an option leaving well before the storm hit. And there was plenty of warning on this storm.

Exactly, there is no reason anyone should be on the roof of their homes in Houston other than inability to heed warnings and read a weather report.

When a mass evacuation of Houston occurred due to Hurricane Rita, 107 people died from the conditions caused by the mass evacuation. The conditions on the roads were very very poor for those following your suggested advice of "heeding the warnings". The storm in the end was not as big of an event as it was made out to be.

It's not as simple a decision as you're making it out to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Rita#Evacuation_deat...

The governor told people to leave. The mayor told people to stay. One of them isn't going to be reelected next term...

Probably what should have happened (I'm using my perfect hindsight here..) is they should have told people living in low-lying areas to either go live with relatives or friends who were on high ground, or leave town altogether. And everyone else to stay. This would have prevented the mass exodus that clogged roads during previous storms, but gotten more people to safety.

I agree that the best option was people who had options leaving early enough that it didn't cause traffic snarls. That leaves emergency services with fewer people to handle in the worst case.

Despite what I said before, I agree it's a really tricky call, especially for authorities considering a mass evacuation, which is often not the best thing. Houston has a lot of people, that changes everything.

> What they should have done is learned when to move or when to stay by: 1. Not buying a house in Houston and then 2. Gotten out well before it was imminent.

The reports I've seen are describing the Houston situation as a 1 in a 1000 year flood. Does it really make sense to avoid a place based on the possibility of such rare events?

I mean the same areas that flooded now flooded in Ike, Rita and Allison, so yea it does make sense. My family lived through each and I'm not sure why they stick where they are.

from what I can tell, it's healthier to live near the water, especially the ocean. so would you see also having an inland retreat as an appropriate set up?

Katrina was a "once a hundred year" storm. Likewise Sandy. Now Harvey is a "once in 500".

All within 12 years. I think we should stop measuring against data from a different global climate.

A "hundred year storm" doesn't mean we expect one per hundred years globally, but one per hundred years locally.

Even that is a little misleading (given how bad our intuition about statistics is). A '100 year flood' is flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year (it's independent of what happened 1, 5, or 50 years ago).

Calling it a '100 year flood' makes people think 'oh, good, now we shouldn't have one of those for another ~100 years'. In reality, the odds of a flood of the same magnitude occurring next year are exactly the same as they were this year.

Grady (of the Practical Engineering YouTube channel) has a great video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc

(Grady is in the Austin area, so hopefully he hasn't too much 'practical' experience from this storm...)

The other thing to remember is a 5 year flood and a 100 year flood are often not very different in size.

When you buy a house in a town there's some chance you may spend the rest of your life there. Even if the risk really is 1/1000 per year, it's still N/1000 per house.

And the risk may be higher than 1/1000 per year given how much motivation is out there to understate the risk and say that nobody could have seen this coming.

It makes sense to rationalize a disaster as somebodys own fault, to get out of the guilt anyone should feel who is so anti-social he can abandon his community on a whime.

> No number of bottles of water in their basement

Some bottles of water on the rooftop could allow them to stay a little more comfortable until help arrives.

water on the roof will not last as long though.

Depending on how long the rescue, takes having food and clean water could be important.

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