by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
Self-rescue.
How many times do you need to see it before you believe it?
People don’t take these threats seriously and then they get either seriously harmed or die. The good news is that technology and warning have both seriously improved in the last 100 years; those who are killed by a natural disaster are down huge, 90% or more, over the last 100 years.
Hurricanes, for example, were many times detected only on approach and thus by the time you knew there was serious trouble coming it was too late to do much in advance. There were a huge number of them that nobody knows about at all because other than a hapless ship that wandered too close nobody ever saw the “fish spinners.” Today we have satellites and thus anything incipient is known when it starts; this is an enormously good thing.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
But there are many disasters that give little or no warning. That it was going to rain a lot in the path of Helene was known; that a cold front was going to drop the sort of moisture it did in front of it into many of the mountain areas was not accurately forecast nor could it be. But — that it was raining heavily in the two days previous was certainly something you could take note of. The “set up” for what happened is very similar to what occurred in 1916 — and so was the outcome. Similarly we can tell when there’s a risk of tornadoes in a given area today but not exactly where one will form or strike. Earthquakes are, with few exceptions, 100% no-warning events. You can determine you live in a seismic zone (e.g. New Madrid, San Andreas, etc.) but there is no way to know when the event will occur.
Many people believe that a “100 year flood” only happens every 100 years. False, but even if it was true how long ago was 1916? Uh, yeah. No, a “100 year flood” means that there is a one percent chance each year and each trial, that is, each year, is independent just as is a coin toss and thus that one year did or did not have a flood has no bearing on whether the next year will. To be more-accurate (I fat-fingered this originally, so this is corrected) you have a 99% chance per-year it won’t flood. So if you live in a place that has a “100 year flood” risk over a 30 year mortgage there is a 73.97% chance you will not get flooded — and a 26% chance you will. If you do get flooded in year 10 the risk of it happening again over the next 20 is about 18%.
That’s right — you have a one in four risk of getting hosed over 30 years of living somewhere under that threat and if you do get hit in year ten you have an approximately one in five-and-a-half risk of getting nailed again over the next 20 years if you stay!
By the way if you’re in a place considered a five hundred year flood area the odds aren’t much better; its 99.8% likely per year you will not flood but cumulatively, over 30 years you still have about a six percent risk of getting screwed. You probably think you are almost-certainly safe because 1 in 500 would put such events at least five human lives apart and thus “it ain’t gonna happen.” You’re wrong.
These are mathematical facts.
