These videos are a better source of information IMO: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2CLEFocYVw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzFYO1EU6rs
I'm far more afraid of these giant Douglas Firs and their branches during snow and wind storms now. And, the likely drop in home value in the next recession.
And realistically I should be more afraid of driving to work every day. (Even though Seattle seems to have pretty good drivers compared to Chicago).
A honest in your face continuous natural disaster, no behind the scenes shaddy stuff that might hut you one day out of the blue. ;-)
Nice touch how the city runs ash collection points or how people living on Sakurajima itself (the volcano) cope with it. They have roofs over gravestones, transparent tents over fruit tree plantations & ash sweeping equipment on every bus stop. Oh and those flying rock shelters every ~600 meters. :)
Yellowstone has a big eruption every 600000 years so you are probably not going to see the next one. (But the destruction will be much bigger.)
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...
> For 2016 specifically, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
The consequences of that earthquake don't sound too bad in comparison to other risks.
That said, if you still want to chance it I researched and it is possible to commute into Seattle from east of I5, just not fun.
Extreme winters in the north and north east, hurricanes along the East and Caribbean coasts, tornadoes in the middle of the US, extreme heat in the south west.
The fires have always been seasonal, but combine that with old infrastructure and poor maintenance, some of it is man made so can be corrected.
The earthquake potential, while could be hugely devastating, happens once every 30 years for medium ones and once every 100 or so years for the big ones. That’s very different from the risks the rest of the country deals with every year.
It gets snow but it’s a long way from the extreme winters you get in the north east. Hurricanes turn into heavy rains when you leave the coast. Earthquake’s are hardly a concern outside the risk of minor property damage.
I wouldn't have thought that would even help much. Even if your house survives, its value will tank and your job will be "toast".
I5 runs through the middle of Seattle. Many people do commute from nearby towns east of Seattle, like from Bellevue, or a little place you may have heard of called Redmond.
But I have an extremely hard time believing that Seattle could get an M9 and Bellevue to Issaquah would be unaffected.
Or that within the city, SLU, being west of I5, is affected, but Capitol Hill directly east is OK.
I grew up in San Jose in the early 80's through the late 90's. When I was 12, I went through the Loma Prieta which had aftershocks for 2 days. I turned off the gas to every house on the block as a preventative measure. There was a lot of internal contents damage but the building codes worked out fantastically... there was very little actual damage except to poorly-engineered structures and structures on landfill that experienced liquefaction. The only real changes where anchoring bookcases and furniture to studs and Velcroing monitors to furniture.
In 2018, I evacuated with my mom from the Camp Fire. As the property had little fuel and large set-backs because of large, water-hungry lawns, the structure survived. What burned: wood fences, a very large shed, ½ cord of wood, almost all of the landscaping and a large blue recycle wheelie bin caught fire and melted into aggregate concrete in a ring. PG&E and the city have so far removed tens of thousands of trees such that a future mega-fire is highly-unlikely for at least 80 years, and they're doing the PSPSes. The worst case near-term is local brush fires. What may lead my mom to move would be if insurance rate go up any more as her CSAA (AAA) premium has doubled. The PSPSes are annoying because maintaining the fuel and oil on a generator is a pain and Xfinity (Comcast) infrastructure shuts-down after the first day.
Elsewhere the weather is horrible. You won't find better weather than the Bay Area outside of San Diego, parts of LA or Hawaii.
The biggest cases against living in the Bay Area are the cost of living (unless #vanlife) and the majority of people aren't planning on staying and so treat the area poorly and each other not so neighborly. These are compounded by the messy, inconsistent, unpleasant decline of American influence where there's a mass shooting nearly every day, terrible poverty like a third-world country and the largest military white elephant the world has known so far.
Of course that’s of no comfort to the people who will perish n such an event.
It’s just that it’s not going to be like a 1920s Tokyo or SF 1906 since we should have better handle on fire and emergency response in general.
In Yellowstone's case, the timescales involved are hundreds of thousands of years or more, where margins of error dwarf human lifetimes.
We just aren't going to live forever. If its any consolation, you'll (not you in particular :D) probably die in a car accident or a cardiac arrest when you aren't even worried about it.