From: New map shows where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur in US
Volcano’s, high taxes, high crime, and a high probability of damaging earthquakes. Seattle is not nearly as attractive as it was when I first moved here just out of college.
I knew about the occasional earthquakes and was thrilled to experience three of them. Now that I’m older, I know just how serious they can be. I would rather not wait around for “the big one.”
The nearest volcano, Mount Rainier, was sort interesting in an abstract way when I arrived. And it is an incredible mountain. It is awe inspiring to go hiking on it. And it seemed to be dormant enough to not worry about.
Mount St. Helen’s blowing up a little over 100 miles away made volcanoes much more real. It obliterated everything within a six-mile radius. And that is just the complete destruction area. There was more:
The deadly pyroclastic surge—a fast-moving, super-hot cloud of ash, rock, and volcanic gas—traveled as much 18 miles away from the blast. The hot lava, gas, and debris mixed with melting snow and ice to form massive volcanic mudflows that surged down into valleys with enough force to rip trees from the ground, flatten homes, and completely destroy roads and bridges. Rivers rose rapidly, flooding surrounding valleys. Ash fell from the sky as far away as the Great Plains. Two-hundred-and-fifty miles away, ash blanketed Spokane, Washington, in complete darkness.
Mount Rainier is about 50 miles to the south from where we live now. Previous mud flows from Rainier have traveled several miles north of where we live. Those flows were in the valleys. We live part way up the side of a mountain. Therefore, I’m not too worried about being directly and immediately impacted by the blast and mud flows.
But even with only some mild ash at our house, the infrastructure issues would be catastrophic because of mud and pyroclastic flows destroying roads, power lines, water lines, and sewage lines. The people issues resulting from a major Mount Rainier blast following the infrastructure destruction would affect everyone for hundreds of miles around. I would rather not have to directly deal with that.
The politics, and especially the gun laws, have gone from benign to oppressive. I can avoid a lot of the pain by leveraging my Idaho connection. But it is a constant source of irritation.
Living in the “Bellevue Bubble”, as Barb and I like to call it, certainly has its advantages. But I really need an option to bug-out if things become an imminent hazard.
