I will take an earthquake risk ANY day of the week over the tornado or hurricane threat a lot of the rest of the country is under.
If I may be permitted to return this thread to California disasters of the natural kind ...
Don't underestimate the emotional toll of a big earthquake. We were in several substantial ones in our time in California, and just three miles from ground zero of the '94 Northridge quake.
It was terrifying. I awoke at 4:31 AM with a physical sensation akin to a pair of sneakers in a tumble dryer, and my wife yelling to son #1, with reference to son #2, "Break his door down if you have to!!!" There was the sound of things crashing to the floor all around; the grandfather clock falling against our bedroom door. We got out through the sliding door from the bedroom to the patio. It was warm for a January pre-dawn -- clear and 65 degrees. It was a Santa Ana wind event -- the warm, dry northeast winds long regarded by some native Californians as "earthquake weather". There was a small brush fire on the hillside above us, from a downed power line, and a red glow in the east, from the inferno where a broken gas main took out an entire block of homes on Balboa Boulevard in Northridge. And there was an unusually bright, starry sky for Los Angeles -- because all the city lights were knocked out. Our feet were wet, from the water that sloshed out of the swimming pool onto the patio. And the ground was still convulsing every couple of minutes.
When we finally worked up the nerve to walk between the houses to the street, we discovered that a couple of hours before the quake, one of our older son's friends had decided it would be funny to toilet-paper our house. But that's another story. As dawn broke we had an impromptu neighborhood block party with all the neighbors, calming nerves and making sure everyone was ok. With daylight I drove six miles of city streets (traffic lights out at all intersections) to check on my grandmother. She was ok, but her chimney was a pile of bricks scattered about her patio. No landline phones were working, of course. We had no contact with the outside world until I was finally able to reach a relative nine hours later with my primitive car-mounted cellular phone.
We spent the next night, still without power, in sleeping bags in the back of our son's pickup truck in the driveway, and the night after that in a pup tent on the front lawn. Neighbors graciously allowed our boys, 19 and 14, to sleep in their big motor home on the street in front of their house. Water service was restored four days later, but we had to boil it for two weeks thereafter. It took four gallon-sized milk jugs of water from the swimming pool for each toilet flush.
It wasn't just the 4:31 AM M6.7 quake ... it was the thousands of aftershocks, that went on for months, that drove us nuts. And all the while scientists on TV were still saying this might just have been a foreshock for an even bigger one. You went to bed every night knowing you would be awakened at least once by an aftershock ...
Our 14-year-old was seriously affected by the quake and continuing aftershocks. After a couple of days I had to fly some files and office equipment in a rented Saratoga to our firm's Palmdale office, which was essentially cut off from our main office due to the collapsed highways. I took our son with me, and dropped him off at a relative's house in the high desert to get him out of the shaking. Now, at age 38, he still sleeps with lights and TV on, all because of January 17, 1994.
Our next-door neighbor was a retired RCAF F-104 pilot. For the next two weeks he would be standing out on the sidewalk with a highball in his hand, not wanting to go back into the house. "I'd rather be shot at in combat than go through this," he said.
(If you wonder what the neighborhood looked like, see the movie "Poltergeist 2", filmed on our street. Our former house is in the movie, second from the corner during the opening credits.)
In an earthquakes all I need to be is outside to be safe.
Not necessarily. In any event, once the shaking starts you don't have enough time to have a choice in the matter.