[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.