Yeah but ....
I live in tornado country and I have a shelter. I watch the storms very closely when they come.
I guess earthquakes are kinda the same. Though one can improve one’s odds by choosing carefully what sort of house one lives in. Can’t do much about a freeway overpass falling on you though.
What a lot of noobs to hurricane country don’t figure into their deliberations however is the difficulty in getting out in an evacuation. Which is what I referenced.
The Houston evacuation for Hurricane Rita was totally botched. Our freeways were such that people moved four miles in 12 hours.
People literally died on the freeways because of the heat. My wife was a “critical employee” at a hospital, so we didn’t try to evacuate. But she sure saw the people coming in to the hospital from the freeway one block away.
She also saw that stranded travelers were siphoning gasoline from the the employees’ cars in the hospital parking lot. It was a madhouse. Mad Max in Houston.
You’ll never have that same problem in Corpus simply because the population is tiny in comparison to the Houston/Galveston area. We’ve made improvements in response to that collosal evacuation disaster, such as making it easy to turn both sides of the freeways into outbound evacuation routes. It has yet to be tested, though.
I wouldn’t be afraid to relocate to the Gulf Coast because of hurricanes, although I think living on the barrier islands is foolish. The truly destructive part of the hurricane is far smaller than the satellite image looks. It’s not a 500 mile wide tornado. More like 40.
Sucks to be in that 40, but if you’re 80 or 100 miles away from the eye, you’re going to get pool furniture moved around. If you’re on the west side of the eye, you can be closer than that with even less trouble.
While people were dying on the Houston freeways trying to evacuate, I had the surreal experience of being the only one there in a subdivision with well more than 100,000 residents. I had hot northerly winds, and almost no rain. It knocked down a few fences around me, but that’s it.
The eye of the hurricane missed me by about 50 miles.
Hurricane Andrew hit me nearly head on. They eye was three miles from my house, and branches were hitting with the force to break brick. So, I’m not minimizing this. I’m just saying that it can be easy to get overly freaked out.