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Notes -
80+ dead and rising in Central Texas floods.
Kerr County is the Summer Camp capital of Texas. It's rugged hill country terrain and proximity to the Guadelupe River is perfect for exotic adventures outdoors, and it is close enough to major population centers to be convenient for parents to drop-off their children.
The downside is that low-lying cabins get completely wiped out in flood events. Camp Mystic for girls has double-digit casualties alone.
It is a common refrain to bemoan the fact that, "we don't let kids be kids anymore," and that may be true, but a big part of it is that we as a society simply don't consider the inherent risks acceptable anymore. I shudder to think about making 10-year-olds sit through a 30-minute site-specific emergency preparedness seminar, but that's where this is going, and given what's happened, I'm not entirely sure it would be a bad thing.
Flash floods and earthquakes are probably my most feared natural disasters, since they give very little warning and there's no real workable contingency for their occurrence.
But as far as disaster preparedness, we humans simply aren't (yet) capable of holding back the forces of nature when they run amok.
Occasionally we get reminded that even our most destructive wars barely hold a candle to a single "act of God."
There's almost nowhere on the planet you can keep your kids that won't be vulnerable to some natural disaster or other.
Civilization has mitigated so many threats that it is easy to feel safe and sound, but every single year there's a set of dice rolls that determine if a particular human settlement gets obliterated or not.
Unless we're willing to spend the entirety of global GDP attempting to disaster-proof every single town and city, we are to left with the option of praying to whatever higher power we believe in.
WW2 killed more people than any "act of God" in recorded history. I'd be more concerned about a nuclear exchange than I would about any natural disaster that's likely to happen during my life expectancy.
Guess that depends on whether you consider plagues or pandemics in that category.
And I'd specifically point out that WWII took a long time to kill that many people, whereas most natural disasters happen over minutes, to hours, to days at most.
In 2004, an earthquake/Tsunami combo killed like 225,000 people in a day.
So on a simple deaths/hour calculation, I'm not certain your point would hold.
A single hurricane allegedly releases almost as much energy as the entirety of humanity's nuclear bomb stockpile. And there's 5-15 of those per year.
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