Built? Have you ever been to southern central Louisiana? What are thousands of impoverished people in manufactured houses supposed to do? And hurricanes are not well understood. The amount of uncertainty in the cone even two-days out leads to a stunningly difficult financial decision for some of the poorest people in the country.

You propose that people should look after themselves, and their belonings. Presumably some of the things people need to do in preparation for a hurricane benefit from economies of scale. Temporary shelter, preparing for rescue operations, structural engineering, stocking of supplies. People would probably be well advised to band together in some sort of emergency management cooperative to share expenses and increase efficiency.

I don't think anybody was arguing otherwise.

The point is that hurricanes are arguably a less difficult emergency to manage – they are predictable, understood and come with plenty of notice, to the point that individual preparation is both possible and effective.

This doesn't mean that centrally-coordinated emergency response isn't still useful – merely that it's not unreasonable for it to cost more to prepare for a rare and unpredictable emergency than a more frequent but predictable one.

> they are also something that every single citizen living in a coastal city knows is inevitable and frequent enough that they take the precautions personally for dealing with them

>Terrorism can strike without warning and the same preparations for terrorism would help in disasters like the blast in Beirut.

If you live in the US you live in a war-faring nation, that is in constant conflict, at home or abroad. To say it can strike at anytime unexpectedly is hard to believe when we instigate it perpetually.

I was just about to post a snide comment "Well not every coastal citizen needs to worry about them at least up to now. Seattle doesn't have...". But darn Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Pacific_Northwest_hurri...

Preparedness for tsunami and earthquake risk is adequate for hurricane risk. The only phenomena not accounted for is high winds and the only form of preparation I can think of there is housing code that requires roofs to be tied down to supporting walls. Having been through many hurricanes including two category 5 hurricanes that downgraded to 4 by the time they reached me, I can't imagine that after a hurricane crosses the olympic peninsula it would still be much of a concern for roofing. For those on the coast the calculus may be different.