If you have an anvil hanging over your head, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the anvil makes sense. Damaging the rope holding the anvil doesn't.
It is entirely feasible that the same amount of potential energy, delivered either in small, successive amounts, but spaced out, proves to be tolerable, while a single large amount would be fatal.
In other words, it'd probably a terrible tradeoff to reduce the impact of some disaster by 0.0001% at the expense of making it 0.1% more likely/frequent to occur.