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News about Europe ignores what happens in the vastness of Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_wildfires, i.e. Russia is only a European country when it fits one narrative over another. The US narrative is transcontinental and so fires in California are national news.

I would bet that it doesn't actually have a lower incidence of natural calamities - Santorini, Pompeii, routine earthquakes & avalanches in the Alps, flooding in the Netherlands & Venice, wildfires in Southern Europe, etc. are evidence of that. I'd bet that it has a lower incidence of natural calamities near populated areas that negatively affect the population.

And the reason for that is evolution. European settlements have been around for thousands of years. Anything built near a place prone to natural disasters that might wipe out the population has already had its population wiped out. By contrast, many large American cities are incredibly new - Houston and the Bay Area (two metros recently in the news for natural disasters) have only held their current megalopolis status for about half a century. Indeed, if you restrict to only old U.S. cities (like Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, etc.), most of them are in locations that are relatively free of natural disasters.