Every region in America gets its own kind of disasters, usually natural disasters, which makes staying there during events and recovery economically unfeasible or unwise. Hurricanes Katrina and that one in New Jersey have shown how effective the US govt is at responding to natural disasters. In case you missed it, since the damage is still being repaired by contracting scams fed by the govt taxes... not well.
America gets terrible hurricanes on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. It also gets flash flooding in the Southwestern deserts such as Las Vegas and Phoenix associated with the storms that peel off from a hurricane that disintegrates down near the tip of Baja Mexico. Those thunderstorms can ALSO cause wildfires in California via dry lightning in the mid to late summer. Wildfires are rarely personally dangerous, but the smoke is annoying and some roads are closed. It is claimed that pot growers lost lots of their "garden grows" to the various wildfires last summer, some of which were arson by competing pot growers. After all, if you burn up your competitors fields, the price you get for your pot is higher. This spirit of competition now results in annual wildfires. Eventually, all the undergrowth will be burned up and the understory clearing project will be considered a success, which should end the tax and spend assessments which infuriate people who own homes in wildfire territory and refuse to clear the brush themselves but don't want to be charged for convicts to do it either. They don't seem to get many wildfires in the East, since it rains constantly there, and the PNW (Pacific North West) is largely too wet. The Interior PNW is dry like Nevada, most of the way to the Canadian Border, due to rain shadow effects and the dry and bitter cold north winds coming down the Rockies out of the polar north. We have been under the influence of this wind for the last week and may see snow here tonight. The upside of this dry wind is it cuts down on ice because the air drags it away to the Southern part of the Valley and off to the coast.
The entire west coast is capable of earthquakes, most of which are merely nuisance level. Once a decade we get some that crack buildings, break windows, and damage pipes and infrastructure. Despite the showy destruction of the Bay Bridge and the Cypress Freeway that was such interesting news in 1989, it was the cracking of the water and sewer pipes which cost the most in repairs and took over 10 years to replace. Those billions caused the recession in California which still lasts today. The building boom came and went in a few short years, following the collapse of the Dot.Com bubble, which ran from 1995 when the internet got popular to 2000 when it was clear that the Millenium Bug wasn't going to destroy civilization after all. All those vaporware stocks imploded, and couples who lost half of their retirement funds in that crash started getting married, buying houses and having babies. The housing bubble inflated, and quality crashed while prices rose. Most of those houses were 3x their value and are empty now, many of them rotting from Cheap Chinese Drywall emitting actual sulfuric acid into the wiring and pipes and leaking everywhere. Some are red tagged for bulldozing. While I disagree with much of what James Howard Kunstler says, I do agree that McMansions were a terrible use of resources, up there with the Spanish Armada attempting to invade England by sea right as a storm came and sank them, back in 1680. Spain never recovered from this. Still hasn't in case you wondered with Never meant.
The Midwest gets tornados, ice storms, and the remainder of hurricanes. They also get nasty blizzards and stationary thunderstorms, and flooding. Honestly, knowing that trailer parks in the Midwest are notorious tornado magnets, I would not be inclined to live in one there, though the ability to drive out of a town with your house hitched behind after being missed by a tornado probably has a certain satisfaction. And driving away from flood, and out from under persistent rainstorms that hover over a town like they get in the Midwest, or away south from the ice storms. That could be okay. I'm sure the Communists would like to limit this, since people getting away from killer storms makes their paperwork more complicated and most Communists I've met have either had debilitating OCD or serious drug habits, which explains why they still think Communism has merit. Anyone who has worked retail knows that's BS.
The South gets that sweaty heat, and again hurricanes. For some reason, the rich people who own mansions on the barrier islands on the Carolina Coast get insurance that rebuilds their houses every 10 years when they're ground into splinters by storm surge waves and hundred mile per hour winds by the latest hurricane. This is the sort of spending that must be stopped. This should not be protected stupidity paid by taxes. If rich people want to own homes that get destroyed, let them pay out of pocket. Same as the fools who build houses surrounded by trees that burn down in California wildfires. No more welfare for the rich. We won't be paying it for the poor soon. America is too broke.
As for big earthquakes, New Madrid is a worry. It has done serious damage, and its last three quakes are 300 years apart. The next quake will topple buildings, destroy bridges, crack water pipes, cut off wells, break levees and dams, and destroy a few trillion dollars of infrastructure, then do it again a year later, and again, and then do it again in a decade, and again. You can see where this is going? New Madrid tends to do some terrible damaging quakes that prevents public utilities from getting fixed for long. Anything underground will get shattered. Anything on poles will risk being dropped or snapped. All utilities will have to become locally backed up, town by town and ranch by ranch. That's quite expensive. This problem will affect that whole region along the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. And the energy will shake, as it did last time, up to Montreal and down to Jacksonville and New Orleans. I suspect most large public earthworks in the Mississippi River Valley will have to be abandoned due to costs of repairs and renewed damage from the faults, which gave serious aftershocks for 70 years last time. I don't know when the next series will start. It might be the end of this century, or it might wait longer or come sooner. Can't really say. The cause of the faulting and earthquakes, btw, is well understood regardless of what ignorant Spanish grad students say. We've known for decades. Failed shear zones leave faults behind which don't move much but they can move to deal with distant stresses, such as the tearing on distant parts of the continental plate. Differential stresses can be expressed in the center. This happens in metals too.
Another area facing really big quakes is the PNW, on the subduction zone of the Juan De Fuca plate and the North American continent, running from Eureka California to the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
This quake is due. It last went off in 1700, Jan 29th, 9 PM, a 9.6 magnitude based on evidence collected by geologists and stories by the native americans in the area, as well as the tsunami damage in Japan. The tsunami damage on the PNW coast goes up to 30 miles inland, though most is more like 10 miles. Still, if you live on the flatlands of the coast, there are now tsunami warning sirens and signs to escape tsunami just as bad as the ones that hit Sumatra and killed 250,000 people back in 2004. This is an obvious "drive away to high ground" kind of disaster. If you don't, you die there. Upside is that most of these towns aren't hit by tsunamis often, and so rebuilding isn't an annual problem like with hurricanes or tornados.
The Northeast is finally getting proper blizzards again. Same with the northern Midwest. These were common back in the 1980's, happening for months at a time every winter. Cars skidding around on icy roads and inches or feet of snow on the ground for months at a time? That was called..."Winter". People who got tired of "Winter" moved to the South or Arizona or LA to live where you can wear shorts all year and work on your tan. This is just how it is. People who have not had proper winters because they don't remember the 1980's or weren't born yet are likely to accept all sorts of religious reasons for the return of normal weather, but the thing is: this is normal weather. Normal weather. Mild winters for a decade was slightly abnormal, but you get abnormal during Interglacial Periods like this. Normal is a statistical thing. Stuff balances out eventually.
Finally, America has volcanoes. None are erupting at the moment, except in Hawaii and Mount Spur up in Alaska, but in the lower 48, there are several that worry people. Mount St. Helens is considered active, since it blew up a few decades ago. Mount Lassen erupted in 1911 and exploded to the northeast. There have been recent earthquakes which bordered its magma chamber so it will likely go off again in coming decades. It is being watched. Mount Shasta has a nice even shape because its eruptions are tidy rather than explosive so it will go off again. Next time it does, it may become the tallest mountain in the lower 48. Its only tens of feet below Mount Whitney, current tallest in the lower 48, itself only feet taller than White Mountain above Bishop, CA, a mountain we know to be growing due to local earthquakes. White Mountain overlooks the Long Valley Caldera, a previously explosive volcano that covered most of the USA in ash from one huge eruption. It is not going to go off again. Its magma source is cut off and its chamber is cooling. Yellowstone however is likely to explode again, and its chamber is 1000 times bigger than previously thought, so can produce debilitating levels of ash across the USA and make Wyoming, Montana, and the Great Plains uninhabitable for decades and destroy windshields in New York City for centuries, because the ash particles are just that sharp. When Yellowstone goes off again, many in the Midwest will quickly find reason to live outside the ashfall area. Last time it hit northern Florida and Greenland, Montreal, Chicago had feet of ash, and the Great Plains were buried so deep it killed most animals living there very quickly. Paleontologists have lots to study from the eruption death tolls. The further away from the eruption, the less irritating the ash will be. Ash decays into good topsoil, so where it is thin enough, plow it in and get the mineral benefits. Where it is thick, it retains its heat for months and eventually melts into glass, which won't grow anything. Breaking through that crust can parboil a limb or vent superheated steam and kills herd animals. Hard rains can create boiling mud flows downstream for miles, which killed hundreds of Filipino tribesmen near Mount Pinatubo, few of which spoke Tagalog so couldn't understand the warnings to stay out of the murky boiling mud streams. Many died trying to cross. Horrible because the camera crews and translators couldn't get through to them.
So the important thing to remember is that nowhere is actually safe from disaster, and some disasters are best left behind. Whether this means snagging your photo album and running for it or packing a Uhaul and leisurely selling your place as you mosey on out like everyone else, that's depending on the scale and severity of the destruction. Life can be challenging, and sometimes that challenge is stupid. Sometimes the right answer is to walk away from the stupid and let some other fool try and show mother nature how tough he is by getting snuffed out instead of you.
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