One thing I thought about several times in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is, “I’m glad that kind of thing doesn’t happen here.” Undoubtedly I’m not alone in pondering how susceptible this area is to natural disaster.
Generally, I think East Tennessee is pretty safe. This area isn’t prone to hurricane damage (several hundred miles from the ocean), earthquakes (several hundred miles from a major fault line), large tornadoes (too hilly), blizzards (too warm), or large wildfires (too wet). The primary natural disaster that threatens this area is (flash) flooding, which you can some degree insulate yourself from by not living in a low-lying area (there aren’t any large flood plains here).
Over at Slate, Brendan Koerner asks where the best place in America is to hide from mother nature. He bases his answer, in large part, to this FEMA graph, which plots presidential disaster declarations by county over a nearly 40-year span. I was surprised to see that East Tennessee is actually one of the more disaster-prone areas, based on the number of declarations. I assume that flooding is the major culprit.
Anyway, according to Mr. Koerner’s non-scientific analysis, what’s the “safest” place in America to live? Storrs, Connecticut.