> Are there any other "accidents waiting to happen" as
> big as New Orleans in the US ?

Bigness can be measured in $ or loss of life or by other measures.
In terms of loss of life there are MANY potentially greater risks.

Space rock anytime.
Anything up to loss of all life.
Death of thousands to millions entirely possible albeit unlikely.
cf eg meteor crater, Arizona (?10,000? years ago) & Tunguska (~100 
years ago) .
Place them in a city and ...

Much of US East coast is Tsunami prone with known potential sources.
Thousands to 100,000s. A similar or greater tectonic plate shift to 
the recent one is possible on ANY plate edge anywhere any time. Place 
one near a more densely populated area and it's all on.

Good volcano possible in many plate-edge locations. None liable to be 
so widespread as Katrina but loss of life could easily be vastly 
greater.
Our "Mt Taupo" (20,000 years ago, biggest on earth to date since then) 
if it happened elsewhere could kill millions.
Rangitoto Auckland is 60% of all Auckland's volcano. Place the next 
one (overdue) in residential Auckland and you'd kill dozens to 
hundreds with the best warning around.  A new Taupo anywhere would do 
far worse. Pryroclastic ash wave was 1 kilometre (!) tall when it 
crossed Mt Tongariro. Surf that!

Worst case earthquake California. Don't ask.

Dirty nuke in a major city not near you.
Some of the world's larger metropolitan areas contain around 20 
million people each.

****BUT**** by far the most likely and most devastating of all is a 
genetic engineering accident. All of human life on earth could quite 
feasibly be destroyed by accident (or on purpose). Any subset of this 
is possible. This is not conspiracy theory hype but a demonstrably 
feasible possibility.



        Russell McMahon









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