Dayton tops the list for least natural disaster prone. Similar with Southern Maryland. Denver is pretty high on the list and Seattle seems pretty safe too.

There are plenty of places to go.

For some reason we seem to love to build massive cities on disaster areas. I'm looking at you SF, LA and NYC.

But hey fuck it, lets just continue being bad at statistics and assume that because a natural disaster happened recently it won't happen again for a long time (the idea of a "500 year" storm is insane).

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/media/top-10-safest-us-cities-from-n...

Seattle is safe? Aren't they under impending doom from the Cascade fault[1]?

[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/cascadia-subduction-zone-ea...

Along with the giant volcano to the East. :)

If the Yellowstone super volcano erupts, it doesn't really matter where in the northern hemisphere you live - in fact life on _most_ of the earth's surface is going to suck for a few decades after that.

I meant Mt Rainier.

Seattle has valve nearby. If anyone ever buys some expensive gem and jams it into exotic machinery.. my bet is on these guys. So very dangerous place to live in..

> etc.

You can't just name three places in a very large country and then say 'etc'.

There are plenty of places with much lower risks of natural disasters. That's a big part of the reason my family lives in central New York.

Upstate New York has some pretty terrible flooding. I don't know where you consider "central New York" (it is -- after all -- a large state). The corridor along I-86 (Elmira, Corning, Hornell, etc), where I lived for a few years, has built up extensive flood controls to prevent future damage. A lesson hard learned from multiple severe floods. Then there was bad flooding just a few years ago in the Mohawk River valley centered around Herkimer.

Probably just the tip of the iceberg in a state that sees a lot of annual rainfall.

That's an easily solved problem though... don't buy a house in a floodplain...

I live in the hills southeast of Syracuse.

Big snowstorms every year. Tornadoes many years.

Tiny tornadoes... nowhere even close to the scale and frequency of midwestern twisters.

Snow? A minor inconvenience, at worst. It's a frequent enough occurrence that municipalities are we set up to deal with it. If you don't have snow tires, there will be maybe 24-48 hours per year that you won't want to go driving (with snow tires, that timeframe is an order of magnitude less).

The difference between a tiny tornado and a big tornado is immaterial when your house is in the path.

There were at least four times in the twenty years that I lived in upstate NY that snowstorms caused power outages and impassable roads at the same time.

You can't just name one place as safe from natural disasters and then explain that the two natural disasters that they get there don't count.

Tornado threat may be sufficiently mitigated just by digging a [dry] hole in the ground, and getting into it whenever the sirens go off. If you have enough money, you can bolt a steel box to your foundation and hide in that instead.

We can actually build structures that can withstand [the most common] tornadoes, without adding too much to the cost of construction. Basically, monolithic concrete shell structures over inflatable forms are effectively "tornado proof", without additional engineering.

The nasty natural disasters in the Midwest are not just blizzards, but freezing rain storms. A coating of ice an inch thick on everything is guaranteed to take down trees and power lines, and make all roads completely impassable. You get up to a week without civilization. For example, if your furnace catches fire, you can call 911, and later find out that the first fire truck they sent out slid off the road into a ditch on the way to your house, and the guys that finally showed up two hours later were the second truck, sent over from the next township (true story). On the Great Plains, it's drought and brushfires. You get to spend a season watching everything turn brown, and then your town burns because some jackoff threw a cigarette butt out of his window on the highway, or because lightning struck the wrong spot.

Thanks to modern meteorology, tornadoes are just much less a threat than they used to be. They might pick off a person here or there every season, but when they do, there will always be neighbors around ready to help. They just don't wipe out an entire city, leaving everyone essentially on their own, because they are all (sometimes literally) in exactly the same boat.

And that's exactly why I am comfortable living in an area where the major natural disaster threats are tornadoes and flash floods.