Agreed.
I saw an interesting bit on OReilly last night. His guest was a physics prof who was making the argument that a massive tidal wave could hit the US east coast, if a volcano off the coast of Africa should blow up, as they apparently fear.
It could devastate the entire east coast. The only saving grace is that it'd take 9 hours to get here, so there would at least be time to evacuate the people.
I agree. We have 2 things that are plusses here. Better built buildings with improvements developed from all the hurricanes that saves some property and better communication, which saves lives.
Every hurricane produces damage and loss of life, but not nearly like the losses from natural disasters in these countries. Our east coast has learned from hurricanes as the west coast has learned from earthquakes.
Yes....there is a dormant volcano in the Canary Islands. There is a fault line that is growing at a rapid rate. There are US scientists there studying the fault. The landmass is large enough that if the one side of the island slides into the sea it will cause significant tidal waves here on the US East Coast.
There is a periodic special on one of the cable channels....Discovery or The Learning Channel where they discuss this and the effects of large land masses sliding into waterbodies. The title is something like Mega Waves or something to that effect. One of these Mega Waves occured in Alaska in a harbor that had a landslide that created a Super/Mega Wave that measured something like almost 100ft in height. The show the bay where this occured and how the treeline was moved up equal to the height of the wave. One eyewitness stated him and his son were on his boat when this occured and ended up riding inland over treetops then pulled back out to the harbor where the boat was not damaged.
Or in the words of the condescending O'Reilly, "...to evacuate the folks."