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Experts: Disaster-free zones hard to find
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-05 17:09
Hurricane victims in Florida and along the Gulf Coast have to be asking
themselves something survivors of tornadoes, blizzards and earthquakes also
wonder: Is there any place you can go that is safe from natural
disasters?
The West has earthquakes and wildfires. Move to the Midwest and you could
find yourself in Tornado Alley. The Northeast? Blizzards, ice storms and heat
waves.
Experts say trying to escape catastrophic weather is a little like trying to
escape from, well, the weather. Short of building a new Biosphere, it is nearly
impossible to completely avoid quakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards or heat
waves.
"Unfortunately, if you drew a map of the United States, you would find that
at least one and most likely two or three of those happen almost everywhere,"
says Larry Kalkstein, senior research fellow at the University of Delaware's
Center for Climatic Research. "Every place has some sort of vulnerability."
Kalkstein knows. He lives in Marco Island, Fla., a Gulf Coast town that took
a direct hit from Hurricane Wilma last month.
Experts say Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma demonstrate that any search
for the safest real estate in America should exclude the Gulf Coast and a good
chunk of the Atlantic Coast.
It's the same with Tornado Alley, the area centering on northern Texas,
Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, and sometimes defined as stretching east to the
Mississippi River or beyond to Ohio.
That leaves a big chunk of the West and the Northeast, though the geography
can be pared down by knocking out fault-riddled California and northern reaches
prone to ice storms and blizzards.
Heat waves could disqualify even more areas, though not necessarily in the
South. Kalkstein notes that hot weather tends to be most deadly in places where
people are not used to it: Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis.
Heat waves are, on average, the most deadly weather phenomenon of the last
decade, according to the National Weather Service. A 1995 heat wave in Chicago
killed more than 700 people in four days, most of them elderly.
William Hooke, director of policy programs for the American Meteorological
Society, says people cannot avoid weather risk, but they can decide the "shape
of the risk." For instance: Do you feel more comfortable living in a tornado
zone or a hurricane zone?
Consider the risks every person faces every day getting into a car or walking
down the street and catastrophic weather seems less of an issue. Federal
statistics show that 369 people died last year from weather hazards, while
42,636 people were killed in traffic accidents and 1.37 million were victims of
a violent crime.
Then there other manmade threats: Cities like Washington and New York are
probably pretty high on a terrorist's list of favorite places.
So, where can you go?
Kalkstein, if "pushed to the corner," would choose Santa Barbara, Calif.,
since it has almost no thunderstorms, no hurricanes, rare heat waves and no
blizzards. But it does have earthquakes.
Joseph Annotti of Property Casualty Insurers Association of America picks the
Midwest. Yes, there are tornadoes, but he notes that nothing matches the
destructive power of hurricanes and earthquakes.
"Even the worst tornado is not going to come close, damage-wise, to even a
Category 2 hurricane," Annotti says.
Still, the average number of people killed by tornadoes in the past decade is
more than twice the number of hurricane deaths: 57 a year versus 21, according
to the National Weather Service. That number does not include the more than
1,000 people who died as a result of Katrina.
Rade Musulin of the American Academy of Actuaries lists the Northwest, the
interior East Coast up the Appalachians, and Utah and Colorado as relatively
safe areas.
Another, completely unscientific way to look at safety is to compare the U.S.
Geological Survey earthquake hazard map, a Tornado Alley map, Kalkstein's heat
wave danger zone and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's county-by-county
map of declared presidential disaster declarations from 1965 to 2003.
The area left out of the resulting crazy quilt of disasters and potential
disasters is ... pretty small.
One relatively safe place seems to be Blanding, Utah (population 3,500). It
is on a mesa, so there is no flooding. City Manager Chris Webb cannot remember
an earthquake or a tornado or, for that matter, any sort of weather emergency.
There is snow, but Webb says the high-desert city has moderate temperatures year
round, so it cannot even maintain an ice rink.
But he cautions: "There is drought down this way."
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