In article ,
"Ann" wrote:

On Sat, 03 Sep 2005 20:04:51 +0000, enigma wrote:

"Ann" wrote in
news
On Sat, 03 Sep 2005 18:23:22 +0000, The Watcher wrote: ...
I'm not looking to avoid all and every catastrophe, but I do try to
get out of the way of the really obvious ones. The way to do that is
pretty easy. Don't play on the highway. Don't live in an OBVIOUS
flood-prone area(especially one that experiences hurricanes). Stay
away from earthquake faults. Others are pretty obvious to rational
people.

I'm only speaking for what I know about, but the rules out living in
the eastern US.

huh? what natural disasters happen in the eastern US with any
regularity? or matbe a better question would be to ask you to define
"eastern US"?

New Orleans doesn't flood "with regularity" either.

I'm not saying that the New England states are a hot bed of tropical
storms, but snow runoff can cause flooding too. And NH's earthquake
history does include some serious ones.

New Hampshire Department of Safety
http://www.nhoem.state.nh.us/Natural...alHazards.shtm " ...In
1978 another great blizzard hit New England. The Blizzard of '78 dumped
24 to 38 inches of the white stuff immobilizing the infrastructure and
blocking major interstate highways.

The Blizzard of '78 was murder on us in Michigan, too. I remember it all
too clearly, despite being a youngster. The wind started blowing out of
the north-northwest late in the afternoon of January 23rd, the day
before my birthday, and by dark, was screaming through at 30+ sustained,
with gusts to 60 and up. When it got "Almost but not entirely unlike
daylight" out the next morning, you couldn't see the street from the
front door, the snow was falling and blowing so fast. The radio stations
were reporting gusts above 80, and warning anybody that didn't have a
life-and-death emergency to stay under whatever shelter they were in
'cause the temp (41 below at our airport) and wind (officially, 51 MPH
with gusts to 73) would freeze exposed flesh in seconds. My birthday
party was cancelled, of course... The storm didn't end until the 28th.
Lake-effect snow dumped - and I mean *REALLY* dumped - on the west side
of the state. Speaking purely of "what I saw myself", when things died
down enough to start poking heads out and looking around, it was a
weird, white landscape. The 11-story Park Place hotel in Traverse City
was drifted in so deep you could literally walk up the drift on the
southeast side (which completely covered the TC Players' Theatre
building next door, and ultimately collapsed its roof) and knock on the
third floor windows. Downtown was basically a wash... 8th street, the
main drag, was impassable for days because the whole "canyon" that the
multi-story buildings on either side formed was drifted solid to between
15 and 18 feet deep. Several people (including us) in the neighborhood
had to literally tunnel out the front door - The houses were buried
completely in some places, with nothing but chimney-tops or TV antennas
to show where they even *WERE*. A few blocks over from us, in the lee of
a big warehouse-type structure, about 3 blocks worth of the entire
street vanished - Looking across where you should see houses standing
and cars parked, you saw absolutely nothing but flat snow with nothing
but the ripple-marks the wind carved in it. Snow drifts across US-23
(just to name one major highway) ranged from 14-25 feet high, with some
of them hundreds of feet long. Private folks who happened to have trucks
carrying snow-blades nibbled away at the drifts to open up the roads
until the county road commission could get its heavy-duty gear dug out
of the completely drifted in county barn/storage lot to start plowing
"for real". Things were shut down solid for at least three days after
that one blew through, and still choked in some out-of-the-way places a
month later. Us kids took advantage of it, of course... More than a few
were seen sledding down the drifts from the tops of houses

On the bright side, we had two weeks of "no school - Nobody can FIND it
for all the snow!"

--
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Short form: I'm trashing EVERY E-mail that doesn't contain a password in the
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