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Comment by ipqk | Hacker News Reader

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Being there is dangerous. Not only because that storm is really testing the roots of those trees but because in general high winds will cause branches to break off and trees to fall over. Walking through a forest during a storm is an easy way to get hurt or die.

I’m surprised to hear that. The best figures I could find seemed pretty flimsy, but one [0] put it at an average of 58 deaths annually while another [1] put it at 407 deaths related to “wind-related tree failure” between 1995 and 2007 (of which 38% or ~155 were people who were outside at the time).

If the last figure accurately represents the proportion who died while outside (vs when trees crushed their homes or cars), it would seem that those ~13 people a year in the US track lower than deaths due to lightning strikes [2].

Personally I’d rather not be out in a storm any more than I’d want to swim during lightning, but in absolute terms it does seem to be a healthy three orders of magnitude safer than being in a car in the US (at ~37K direct fatalities annually [3]).

[0] https://weather.com/news/news/2021-05-11-falling-trees-durin...

[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.45....

[2] https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-fatalities

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...

I would presume that most people stay inside during giant storms.

Like statistics are a bad way to evaluate risk if the risk is easily avoided. Not many people die from swimming in lava; it is still wrong to conclude jumping into lava is safe.

> but in absolute terms it does seem to be a healthy three orders of magnitude safer than being in a car in the US (at ~37K direct fatalities annually [3]).

Absolute terms of being in a car measured this way don't make sense.

People in the US are exposed to tens of billions of hours of driving annually and probably low millions of hours of being in bad storm conditions in forests. (I don't know, do 1 out of 300 of us even spend an hour in that?)

This is like saying that because few people die from playing Russian roulette, it's not too big of a concern to play now and then.

The response you've made has no probative value on the statement "Walking through a forest during a storm is an easy way to get hurt or die."

Stats seem irrelevant when you see the ground lift up and stand downwind of a massive tree attached to the airborne ground.

Hike in the woods during a storm, witness large tree limbs coming down around you all the time. Having a plurality of URLs doesn't change reality.

Their issue is they're comparing the absolute number and not the rate

Good luck to both of you, I hope you roll a 20.

As a counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/795/

The English countryside equivalent of death-by-falling-coconut, I guess - despite the danger, it's just not something people think about.

This was the Scottish countryside

That's why it's awesome.

i'd personally rather my dog check out what its like to ride the earth wave than have to do it myself

and who would film it?

It's probably not any more dangerous than being tethered to another being when you need to get out of the way quickly.

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