On Sep 4, 2005, at 3:57 PM, Jinx wrote:

> Are there any other "accidents waiting to happen" as
> big as New Orleans in the US ?
>
Do you want to count possible earthquake faults ?  Lots of California
is "prepared" for earthquakes up to a certain magnitude (maybe), but
there's that fault in the mid-west that everyone just hopes will remain
idle.

There are assorted volcanos.  Mt Rainier I hear is widely worried about,
should it have the sort of catastrophic eruption that is possible.
Mt St Helens is currently active.  Hawaii has (is?) active volcanos.

There are assorted areas hit by moderate floods, tornados, and lesser
hurricanes rather frequently.  there could be an uncommonly large one
of any of those, I suppose.

All of which would be pretty hard-pressed to equal the death toll
of an average year of traffic accidents. :-(

A big advantage of the US is that it's BIG.  Even a major disaster
in a major population center leaves an incredible amount of the
country left to assist.  Beaurocratic snafus preventing aid from
reaching where it is needed is NOTHING compared to having your whole
country's infrastructure blasted (which I gather happened in the case
of some of the tsunami victims earlier this year.) (and of course,
that makes it all the more tragic, when the resources to help were
available but unable to help for silly reasons.  Sigh.)

BillW
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