Reply to Would you rather live in Hurricane country or Earthquake country?

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Reply to "Would you rather live in Hurricane country or Earthquake country?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Someone above posted that they'd take quakes because it likely would affect you "once in a lifetime." Huh. There are quakes happening ALL the time off the west coast and on land as well, just not necessarily ones you feel. I saw this for myself when I had a work visit to the US Geological Survey in SF a few years after Loma Prieta. The seismologists gleefully pointed out that there was a quake going on just off the coast from where we were at that moment. And they noted that though they get better and better all the time at predicting quake possibilities, they cannot ever guarantee they'd be able to predict a large quake. [/quote]

Yes, they happen all of the time, but they basically are total non-events.  Except once in a lifetime.  Maybe twice if you are unlucky.

I grew up in a place with neither and was pretty freaked out about the idea of earthquakes when I moved to California.  I lived there for 15 years (both LA and bay area) and only even felt 3-4 earthquakes, and they were super small. Nothing fell off the wall.  I was not affected by them, or by any quake.  I do expect if I lived there longer, I would have eventually experienced a "big one" that would have caused damage locally. Even then, I lived & worked in seismically safe buildings, so risk of serious impact is low.

In the mentioned Loma Prieta (SF area) quake, 63 people died.  In the Northridge (LA are) quake, about the same. These are the worst recent quakes.  These seem similar to the worst hurricanes.  Katrina had many more (on par with the 1906 SF quake), but there were other factors that made that especially bad.  https://www.statista.com/statistics/236725/earthquakes-with-the-most-fatalities-in-the-us/

The wildfires have been pretty terrible though, especially with the preventative power shut offs on high risk days and bad air quality if a fire occurs somewhere in the distance.  This would be a far greater deterrent.[/quote]

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