Why live in harms way?
I live in Hawaii, where there are risks for any number of natural disasters. I have neighbors who live on this island because their ancestors’ bones have been buried here for a thousand years or more. If they lose their job, they know how to find squid and crack coconuts. They share with their extended family and friends. And me? I realized one day that if a catastrophic landslide like the ones that created Kauai’s Na Pali(The Cliffs), Oahu’s Nuuanu Pali, or the highest sea cliffs in the world on the north side of this island, Molokai, it might well create a tsunami that would wipe out all human life in the Hawaiian islands, with very little warning. I realized that if that was going to happen, I would rather be wiped out along with everybody else. Besides, I moved here from Washington, DC, where I lived near the capitol dome, so that, if terrorists dropped an atomic bomb on Congress, I would die instantly, intead of lingering like the folks in the suburbs. Everywhere you live, there a
That’s a tough one. Because area’s that used to be safe, aren’t anymore. The dynamics have changed. Arsonists and wildfires. Landuse practices that attempt to tame rivers, and 100 year floods, 500 year floods that come along to prove we haven’t done so. This question touches a raw nerve because as we speak firefighters are mopping up a fire where a friend used to live. He called from Norway to ask if we’d heard about the fire. Cause unknown, I believe, but almost certainly human related. So because of the terrain, in harms way, yet not in the same category, I suppose, as what you ask in your question. When we bought a home, a lot of things factored in besides the physical cost. I’d had a geology professor point out susceptible areas in the county years before, and I avoided them in considering areas in which to purchase a home. It just seemed prudent! We live near a river that’s been chanelized, with 2 dams upstream. We bought on high ground. And we’re not at the forests’ edge, where w
