[iongoatb]

I work remotely and was planning on moving to Seattle next year. The more I research about the Cascadia Subduction zone and the overdue M9 earthquake, the more I am hesitant to want to live in Seattle. I honestly don't think it's worth moving to somewhere that is anticipating the worst natural disaster in the history of the USA. I think it's beautiful and a great city but it's not a risk I'm willing to take. Especially since it seems the region is extraodonarily underprepared.

[iongoatb]

Btw, from my research, the New Yorker article is a little sensationalized.

These videos are a better source of information IMO: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2CLEFocYVw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzFYO1EU6rs

[hugs]

Those videos include an excellent reminder that statistically, you are very, very likely to survive the initial quake, therefore it's smart to stock up on 2 weeks of food and water, and to take a first aid training class.

[iongoatb]

Yes, it's the aftermath that I would be worried about. That and the well-being of your family. What if the quake happened in the middle of the day when the kids were in different schools, the wife was across the bridge in the city, and I was all the way over in Redmond? The destruction would take down cell service, internet, roads, bridges, water lines, electricity - everything to a screeching stop, potentially for WEEKS. That would be catastrophic.

[daxfohl]

I had the same worry three years ago when I moved here. And of being the closest big metro to North Korea. I've gotten used to it. After doing a bit of research I realize the story is overblown (I mean, it'll be bad, especially on the coast, but most people a bit inland will survive and carry on. I lived through Wenchuan so.).

I'm far more afraid of these giant Douglas Firs and their branches during snow and wind storms now. And, the likely drop in home value in the next recession.

And realistically I should be more afraid of driving to work every day. (Even though Seattle seems to have pretty good drivers compared to Chicago).

[rrmm]

Well whatever you do, don't start looking up Yellowstone.

[gus_massa]

The fault in the article produce a big earthquake every 400 years, so you have a 1/5 chance of seeing one.

Yellowstone has a big eruption every 600000 years so you are probably not going to see the next one. (But the destruction will be much bigger.)

[mc32]

Also Naples, IT, also sits atop a “supervolcano”[1]. It’s one whose volcanoes have erupted rather recently.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegraean_Fields

[m4rtink]

I recommend moving to Kagoshima - they have an activo volcano right over the bay (with fregvent ferry service, no less) that regurarly covers the 400k people city in ash.

A honest in your face continuous natural disaster, no behind the scenes shaddy stuff that might hut you one day out of the blue. ;-)

[rrmm]

I can appreciate that about a natural disaster. Or one could move to Australia which in general doesn't really try to hide the fact it's constantly trying to kill you.

[robin_reala]

It’s the dirtiest city in Japan that I’ve been too, purely down to the light coating of volcanic ash every building, road and public bench seems to have. Very friendly though and the best butasando.

[m4rtink]

Exactly! First you notice its a bit dusty everywhere, then that places that are not regularly swept seem to accumulate dirt a lot faster than normal - ant then you put one and the huge volcano next door together and bam! :-D

Nice touch how the city runs ash collection points or how people living on Sakurajima itself (the volcano) cope with it. They have roofs over gravestones, transparent tents over fruit tree plantations & ash sweeping equipment on every bus stop. Oh and those flying rock shelters every ~600 meters. :)

[robin_reala]

I felt sorry for the poor school kids that had yellow safety helmets instead of the usual yellow bucket hats.

[eitland]

Butasando looks like some kind of food but it doesn't seem to be well know, this discussion already seems to be on third place on Google for the word.

[robin_reala]

Ah, sorry, pork katsu sandwiches. I’d recommend this place in particular: https://gurunavi.com/en/fb5k900/rst/?

[gst]

> FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

> For 2016 specifically, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

The consequences of that earthquake don't sound too bad in comparison to other risks.

[macrolime]

If you want this comparisons to make any sense you need to compare with the number of traffic deaths in the area that can be affected by Cascadia, otherwise you might as well compare with millions of other deaths anywhere in the world.

[Communitivity]

Ken Murphy was the FEMA director at the time. He said that if the Cascadia Fault quake hits "Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast." That's pretty much all you need to know. Insurance probably won't cover quake damage without prohibitive additional charges, so even if you get out you'll lose everything. I've not gone after some Bay Area opportunities I had because of this, and because my wife is terrified of the fires in California.

That said, if you still want to chance it I researched and it is possible to commute into Seattle from east of I5, just not fun.

[bluejekyll]

It’s all some degree of trade-offs.

Extreme winters in the north and north east, hurricanes along the East and Caribbean coasts, tornadoes in the middle of the US, extreme heat in the south west.

The fires have always been seasonal, but combine that with old infrastructure and poor maintenance, some of it is man made so can be corrected.

The earthquake potential, while could be hugely devastating, happens once every 30 years for medium ones and once every 100 or so years for the big ones. That’s very different from the risks the rest of the country deals with every year.

[Retric]

Virginia seems to get a little of everything, but not enough to be an issue.

It gets snow but it’s a long way from the extreme winters you get in the north east. Hurricanes turn into heavy rains when you leave the coast. Earthquake’s are hardly a concern outside the risk of minor property damage.

[bagacrap]

The West (4 corners) doesn't really get disasters although the typical weather is pretty bonkers.

[asveikau]

> it is possible to commute into Seattle from east of I5,

I5 runs through the middle of Seattle. Many people do commute from nearby towns east of Seattle, like from Bellevue, or a little place you may have heard of called Redmond.

But I have an extremely hard time believing that Seattle could get an M9 and Bellevue to Issaquah would be unaffected.

Or that within the city, SLU, being west of I5, is affected, but Capitol Hill directly east is OK.

[Communitivity]

Great point. What I was looking at was from 45m-1hr to the east of Seattle, not counting traffic.

[dTal]

>That said, if you still want to chance it I researched and it is possible to commute into Seattle from east of I5, just not fun.

I wouldn't have thought that would even help much. Even if your house survives, its value will tank and your job will be "toast".

[anon463637]

There are risks almost everywhere. I remember seeing a combined risks map that showed there was really only a small patch in the southwest devoid of all types of regional major disasters. There is no "perfect" place to live, and you live in fear, you'll never live. And if you ignore the coming droughts and famines that maybe nearly global and everyday safety, then you're optimizing based on unreasonable, manufactured FUD from watching too much mainstream media rather than taking an active, data-driven approach.

I grew up in San Jose in the early 80's through the late 90's. When I was 12, I went through the Loma Prieta which had aftershocks for 2 days. I turned off the gas to every house on the block as a preventative measure. There was a lot of internal contents damage but the building codes worked out fantastically... there was very little actual damage except to poorly-engineered structures and structures on landfill that experienced liquefaction. The only real changes where anchoring bookcases and furniture to studs and Velcroing monitors to furniture.

In 2018, I evacuated with my mom from the Camp Fire. As the property had little fuel and large set-backs because of large, water-hungry lawns, the structure survived. What burned: wood fences, a very large shed, ½ cord of wood, almost all of the landscaping and a large blue recycle wheelie bin caught fire and melted into aggregate concrete in a ring. PG&E and the city have so far removed tens of thousands of trees such that a future mega-fire is highly-unlikely for at least 80 years, and they're doing the PSPSes. The worst case near-term is local brush fires. What may lead my mom to move would be if insurance rate go up any more as her CSAA (AAA) premium has doubled. The PSPSes are annoying because maintaining the fuel and oil on a generator is a pain and Xfinity (Comcast) infrastructure shuts-down after the first day.

Elsewhere the weather is horrible. You won't find better weather than the Bay Area outside of San Diego, parts of LA or Hawaii.

The biggest cases against living in the Bay Area are the cost of living (unless #vanlife) and the majority of people aren't planning on staying and so treat the area poorly and each other not so neighborly. These are compounded by the messy, inconsistent, unpleasant decline of American influence where there's a mass shooting nearly every day, terrible poverty like a third-world country and the largest military white elephant the world has known so far.

[pchristensen]

I’ve driven I-5 (N/S) and I-90 (east) and 90 is much, much easier and faster to get into Seattle. You can see it in the housing prices to the south of Seattle - towns that look close are essentially in-commutable and somewhat cutoff from the downtown job market and salaries.

[mc32]

While I think it’s exaggerated, the concerns are valid. If something like what hit Alaska in the ‘60s hits a more densely populated are there will be damage and things will be off line for a while. But also it’s not a catastrophic event that wipes out the economy of the area.

Of course that’s of no comfort to the people who will perish n such an event.

It’s just that it’s not going to be like a 1920s Tokyo or SF 1906 since we should have better handle on fire and emergency response in general.

[dboreham]

I moved next to Yellowstone. Much worse disaster expected here.

[hugs]

Do people there shrug off the risk? Or does it feel like they are generally aware of and have planned for it?

[SmirkingRevenge]

There's not really any risk worth worrying about, there is no imminent eruption coming. Its not even a given that it will have a major eruption again. If it does start erupting, we're most likely going to know its imminent well ahead of time (earthquakes, smaller eruptions, etc).

In Yellowstone's case, the timescales involved are hundreds of thousands of years or more, where margins of error dwarf human lifetimes.

[dmux]

I've had similar thoughts, but wouldn't giant companies like Amazon be taking this into consideration if it were really an issue?

[ericwaller]

For what it’s worth, Amazon did just have a very public search for an HQ2 location and ended up picking one on the other side of the country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_HQ2

[rrmm]

I wouldn't count on it. In terms of their IT infrastructure, they've got more than one datacenter geographically distributed so they're prepared for it. I don't think companies are really good about planning around events that don't happen regularly. Especially one as amorphous as "the big one" in a place that isn't California.

[iongoatb]

Agreed. AWS's cloud infrastructure is all about high availability and spreading computing/data resources across regions. The company's operations will be fine. Although, I'm sure the higher ups in Seattle have personally spent enormous resources to get their homes upgraded and have extensively prepared for something like this. The average person can stock up on non-perishable food and water, but besides that they don't have the resources to truly prepare for what is coming.

[rrmm]

You can't really prepare for everything. I would even doubt if most of the Amazon higher-ups are thinking much in this direction or are prepared in even the usual ways (2 weeks of food, a barrel of water, and extra batteries level).

We just aren't going to live forever. If its any consolation, you'll (not you in particular :D) probably die in a car accident or a cardiac arrest when you aren't even worried about it.

[iongoatb]

You can certainly prepare your house for the earthquake and shaking. For one, reinforcing the structure, making sure the ground is under the house is attached to stable, hard rock like granite versus sediment, and very importantly, using wood instead of brick or concrete (look at Bill Gates's Xanadu house - it's not a coincidence that it is completely made out of wood, the best house material for withstanding earthquakes). These people are definitely consulting scientists and engineers and preparing themselves and their family for a potential M9+ event.

[rrmm]

The tsunami is more of the problem in the area than the earthquake as far as I understand.