This chilling site lets you overlay the New Orleans floods over your city and see if your home, or your friends' and family's homes, or places precious to you, would have been wet.
In Seattle, the water would have come very close to my neighborhood.
In Minneapolis-St. Paul, our first home would have been just on the edge, my workplace, college, high school would have been drowned.
I know these are far from perfect (the Seattle one shows a great deal of Puget Sound and Lake Washington being underwater, which ... duh), but they still personalize a disaster for many of us who are far away.
Whenever I hear people (and there are many) blaming the folks in that area for living there in the first place, I think of The Foibles' song about San Francisco, "The Biggest, Most Dangerous Lily Pad in the World." It goes:
"I've got an idea, crazy but it might work!
Let's build a city, on top of a landfill, on top of a fault line.
You can leave your heart there.
We're all gonna die."
And then I think of the fact that people in Seattle, including a dear friend of ours, drive every day across the Alaska Way viaduct, which has been predicted to liquify in the next big Seattle earthquake. And yet instead of closing it down or building something new, the city just fights over what to do as if we have all the time, all the time in the world.
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Huh, I'd actually been spending most of this week thinking our house would be safe if Toronto ever flooded. Not so much; we're right around 10 o'clock of that circle.
Fortunately, Lake Ontario isn't subject to the same sorts of storms that can build up in the ocean. Not that that's much consolation, really; one of our national newspapers seems to think we're more likely to be assaulted by a disease pandemic.
Happy Monday!
Yeah, but everywhere in the country has some sort of natural disaster just waiting to happen. Mt. St. Helens was supposed to be extinct. The New Madrid Fault runs through the Mississippi valley, created Reelfoot Lake and rang the bells in Boston the last time it slipped. Yellowstone is over one of the biggest volcanic areas just waiting to go. San Andreas could drop California into the ocean whenever the "big one" hits. Hawaii is made of volcanos. If you live in Tornado Alley, you know what's liable to hit just about anytime. If you live on the Atlantic coast, you're in a lottery for a hurricane to strike. Just by living you run the risk of losing everything and dying. People seem to forget how much risk there actually is, and in many ways that's a good thing otherwise they'd be petrified to leave the house. As the viking Skirnir said, "Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors."
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