[trprog]

Its all about spending your energy preparing for more likely damaging events. In Australia little attention gets paid to earthquakes but fire safety standards and preparation are no joke, especially in the country.

Maintaining fire breaks and doing controlled burns are a big part of life for a lot of country people. Its not entirely uncommon for people to have backup generators and a pump specifically so they can still pump water in the event of a fire and power has been lost. Many homes that are surrounded by bush sit on their own little island of barren ground that has been cleared of virtually all vegetation.

It freaks out me out seeing TV shows from the US in particular where they have houses surrounded by trees with trees literally hanging over the house. The road leading out also has a beautiful canopy of trees right against the side of the road. They look like deathtraps to me but presumably they don't live in a walk-in tinderbox like some parts of Australia.

[hga]

Yeah, it depends on the region, but here in my pretty wet part of SW Missouri we have "Red Flag" days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_warning) when we have to be extra careful, but we're simply not in real danger of that sort of disaster, although I did remove the tree "literally hanging over the house" and damaging the roof of the house I recently bought that was built in 1910, that's just simple prudence in many dimensions.

But the house is still surrounded by trees, including a couple of giant maples in the back yard which need topping, then again this is in city neighborhood with 0.06 or a bit more hectare residential lots, without a good fire fighting service it would have eventually gotten burned out one way or another. We've even got one city, Somerville, MA, which has enough fuel density in its residential buildings to support a true firestorm (and I've watched their firefighters in action, they's good).

On the other hand, out in the drier western part of the country, in plenty of it people ought to take the sorts of precautions you outline, but of course many are complacent and expect the government to come to their rescue, are just willing to make the tradeoffs (many areas aren't that dry), or I'm sure in some cases are limited by zoning from doing the smart thing.

Here we also had many decades of insane government forestry polices where simply stopping all fires was the paradigm. You can guess what the eventual result was, as well as how dicey trying to do the first controlled burn of a fire suppressed area is....

[disordinary]

When I was a kid at school in Auckland we had regular earthquake and volcano drills. I'm sure the earthquake drills are even more regular here in Wellington, we also have Tsunami sirens and every coastal suburb has lines on the roads and footpaths directing you to Tsunami safety zones.

It's amazing what people will put up with :)

[hga]

Rather similar here in Tornado Alley, and put to the test in the smallish city I was born and raised in, and retired to in time for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado

Yeah, if you grow up with the threat, it's not that big a deal until one hits.

[disordinary]

A few years ago I was flying to Russia from New Zealand, a friend of mine was flying to Ireland. Ironically we were both on the same flight from Auckland to Osaka, and then on the same flight from Osaka to Frankfurt. From Frankfurt our flights diverged.

In Osaka I was called to the checkout, where in typical Japanese efficiency they said there were some issues at Frankfurt and they had already printed my ticket for my next flight. This was a life saver.

Anyway, it turns out there was a huge snow storm and Frankfurt was having to cancel 500 flights a day. The place was like a refugee camp with thousands of people sleeping on stretchers, etc. The queue to talk to anyone or checkin lasted for hours, and people couldn't leave the airport because if your name was called for a flight you had to be there to take it. Every single flight in Europe's busiest airport were grounded except the Russians, the biggest snow storm in years was nothing and I only had to wait a couple of hours, my friend was there for a couple of days. So it really is amazing what you're used to.