Dan Minette wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Julia Thompson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 10:24 PM
> Subject: Re: Homeowners Associations - Dictatorships in the US?
>
> > Dan Minette wrote:
> > >
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: "Julia Thompson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 7:48 PM
> > > Subject: Re: Homeowners Associations - Dictatorships in the US?
> > >
> > > We're a lot more worried about an F5 tornado hitting our
> > > > house.)
> > >
> > > I think that you are more likely to be killed by a giant asteroid than
> by an
> > > F5 tornado. :-)
> >
> > Well, a giant asteroid hasn't hit Williamson County the whole time I've
> > been living here, whereas a chunk of Jarrell was levelled in 1997,
> > houses stripped off their foundations in some places; the only survivors
> > in those areas were underground, so we took steps to maximize our
> > chances of survival in *that* event.
>
> No hard feelings, but there is a bit of an error analyzing those
> probabilities.
Probably so. But that's the event that made us paranoid about that
particular problem. Well, that and the much smaller twister whose path
went straight through Dan's family home when he was a teen-ager, but
which hopped over the house.
> Yes, a F5 death did occure in your county, but you really
> need to look at the probability for the area, not just your county. Yes,
> Austin has decently high probabilities, but they aren't all _that_ high.
> I'd guess the chance of dying in any given year is around 1 in 10^7. I
> don't sweat those type of numbers.
There probably hasn't been much of anything in the area we're going to
be living in. But the 1997 event wasn't the first time Jarrell had been
hit relatively hard (relative to the Austin area), and it's just close
enough to make me paranoid. (Much closer to our current home, a grocery
store was hit badly enough to need rebuilding, rather than repair. That
was a few miles up the highway from where we are now, and the accounts
of that were pretty scary, as well.)
I figure it's worth the extra $10,000 at the time the house is built to
mostly eliminate the risk. It's certainly worth $10,000 not to listen
to Dan worry (read "panic") about the possibility every time there's a
tornadic storm within 20 miles of us. :)
Julia
p.s. Rob or Dan, how does the tornado incidence in the Houston area
compare with that of the Dallas area? Dan grew up around Dallas, and
that's colored his perception of tornadoes a *lot*.
