I am fortunate to live in California. We have mostly cliffs on our coastline so we're mostly immune to tsunami. We don't get hurricanes here recently since our water is too cold to sustain them, being chilled by fertile upwelling currents from winds out of Alaska. Its probably our fault people put anchovies on pizza. We did get hurricanes 100K+ years ago. It's possible we will again if the Alaska Current and Longshore Drift die for some reason. We do get secondary rains from hurricanes in Mexico during the summer and fall. That often leads to local flooding and lightning fires, like this summer gave us. Fires lead to mudslides and lowland flooding and levy breaks, but we accept and expect that and pay for the maintenance. We don't pretend there are no disasters here. That's an Eastern thing.
No strong hurricane effects like the East Coast and Gulf Coast do. They have long flat shores and get hammered by these events. It's really nothing new, but people are stupidly insistent on building as close to the beach as they can, then complain when the next hurricane knocks their house down. Then they demand we pay to rebuild their mansion through taxes or insurance company bailouts on homes that don't deserve insurance in the first place. If you're going to spit into nature's eye, expect to have your house knocked down. This is why we build out of Wood in California, instead of stone. Wood survives earthquakes better. We think of our homes are more comfortable and upgraded tents, temporary, rather than permanent fixtures for generations of family for past and future centuries. Its an extraordinary cultural difference.
So what is the East Coast going to do about Sandy to defend against the next one? A kinda goofy video segment from PBS suggests building trillion dollar movable barriers to block shipping into New York harbor and possibly cutoff the storm surge from another hurricane Sandy someday in the future. It's showy, probably ineffective, and the sort of dumb the Baby Boomers would vote to pass on the cost for to their grandchildren. There's little consideration given for the maintenance costs from coastal erosion or the loss of traffic to the harbor gutting income to New York City, money they can't do without. There was also no admission to the fact that engineers can get it wrong. Japan was heavily damaged on the coast because their levies were 5 feet too short to stop the tsunami a few years ago and a LOT of people died. They did their best and designed as well as they could predict, but nature upped the ante. I cried when I saw those people die.
There is one sure way to avoid coastal flooding from tsunami or storm surge. Live and work at a higher elevation. I make a point of living above 400 feet elevation. 40 feet is probably plenty. The city of Sacramento is 12 feet above sea level, or 10 feet below in some neighborhoods. The delta islands are 25 feet below sea level, more during high tides. Most of that land is just orchards so not actually very valuable. If it floods and there's no govt bailout it will likely be abandoned. The lower parts of Old Sacramento were already filled in after numerous spring floods. Most of the Old Sacramento shops are second floor, actually. The original street level is visible across the street from the train museum, 14 feet below the current street. The levy wall to the west keeps the Sacramento River from flooding into the city, and dams and other flood zones relieve pressure during big storm events or major meltoffs in the Sierras. We did our part. We gave up land and filled things in and levies are barely maintained in the places where it matters the most.
The homes wrecked on the Jersey Shore by Sandy, and the recent fires from corroded wiring immersed in salt water, and the continuing refusal by FEMA to condemn homes and apartment buildings under pressure from higher up, means there are people who can't start over with the insurance money, a year later. Power remains off in many of the buildings due to fried power transformers, which have a 3 year wait from the only manufacturer of them... in China. Abandoning New Jersey's storm damage for pennies on the dollar works to the advantage of developers who want to replace poor black apartments and rent control with big mansions sold to white people. This is open racism. Open racism aided by FEMA, which takes orders from the White House. Not cool.
The cure for coastal flooding is bulldoze and leave uninsured all properties less than 20 feet above sea level. This is bad for New York City, since Manhattan is built about 4 feet below sea level, due to local subsidence. Bad for the whole Gulf Coast, really, but is it my duty to pay for those clowns to rebuild in the same place and enjoy their luxuries? Let them take the risk and pay for the costs when that risk turns into hurricane flood damage. The East LAUGHS at California whenever we have fires, floods, and earthquakes. They're openly hateful against me and mine. And that take 60% of our taxes and never send them back. My state would be better off without the rest of you clowns. We already build smart, and we are unsympathetic when houses on the coast fall off a cliff. We say "Duh!", not "rebuild with my money!". Same response to people who refused to cut back the pretty trees in their rural mountain cabin so it burned to the ground in wildfire that they could have personally prevented through clearing brush. We say "go to hell". Californians are unsympathetic to deliberate stupidity. We've all seen examples of suicide and self destructive behavior by people who should know better.
I've read numerous stories of non-accidental fires in New Jersey, as arson offers a chance for an insurance payoff that FEMA refuses to do their jobs post-Sandy, a chance for the owners to take the money and start a life elsewhere. If I were in their shoes I'd get a place higher elevation or out of state entirely. Somewhere a little more rational about disasters and not so dependent on a federal aid agency that just doesn't seem to follow through. And maybe there's a funding reason behind this rather than pure political malignance. Maybe FEMA has been told that the federal govt can't afford to bail out the insurance companies behind those places and those companies have threatened bankruptcy over the cost. Rather inevitable considering the number of buildings wrecked. And the bigger issue: the federal govt can't fund rebuilding in many disasters while paying for wars overseas with no exit strategy, extended under the current president despite assurances in his first run for office to pull out. There is no money for more disasters, and maybe not enough money for Sandy victims. Is this the real reason nobody is really helping those people?
Say there's a big quake in New Madrid that levels four states, causes slight damage in 10 more states, and kills 10,000 people (best case, worse is millions of dead), is there tax money to rebuild all those brick and steel structures? Building materials aren't free. Neither is labor. Nor is replacing all the water pipes in the ground or the telephone poles knocked over or the dams that failed or the roads that sank in liquefaction like the last time that happened in 1805. Church bells rang from the shaking in Boston and what would one day be Chicago. There were aftershocks for the next 60 years, and the initial quake was followed a month later by one just as big, with another the same magnitude a few months later. New Madrid was a disaster when there were barely 10,000 people in the area. With 40 million homeless, how's FEMA going to handle that? How will the population react to the shaking when the new brick house cracks in the aftershocks and has to be demolished too? Will folks in Tennessee still be mocking Californians? Will Washington be able to budget for that? I don't think so. A New Madrid quake series will be so destructive that it will bankrupt the nation, and with so many millions homeless we can't pretend nothing happened. Its not like Sandy with a few thousand homeless staying with family nearby or moved out of state.
And that's where the big issue comes in. FEMA can't do much in a regional scale disaster. I've read their reports. Watched their videos. You're mostly stuck with what state and local aid is available and save yourself when possible. The smart answer is often to leave the area behind and find somewhere still intact. Somewhere with working utilities and a functional economy and power grid. One not overwhelmed by disaster. At least not yet. When the Big One hits in California, FEMA won't be able to deal with all the refugees. They won't be able to keep up with the utility damage or fix the water pipes or restore power everywhere. They'll basically give up like they did in New Jersey and New Orleans. Americans just don't care about their fellow man for long. We change the channel and laugh at a sitcom instead. We just don't care enough about our fellow man.
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