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Unfortunately there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable. The PNW also burns regularly now, never mind the enormous earthquake looming under us that we're terribly unprepared for. Even the northeast is starting to get buried in smoke in the summer and hit by storms like Hurricane Sandy. Tornado Alley knocks out much of the midwest. What's left of the US? Desert and mountains?

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This has been well-studied by disaster recovery and business continuity boffins. There are sites that are known to be (1) effectively disaster-free, whether earthquakes, severe weather, volcanoes, tsunamis, wildfires, flooding, etc, and (2) sufficiently connected to commerce and the economy that you can reasonably build and fully operate a business from there. Climate change has relatively little impact on the suitability of these sites, both in theory and in terms of modeled scenarios.

The two cities I’ve seen most commonly used for these purposes are San Antonio and Salt Lake City. Phoenix and Las Vegas are also sometimes used. Most of the sites are in the western US away from the coasts. I believe parts of the upper midwest are also sometimes used for these purposes, though these areas have to contend with extreme cold (which is more difficult to deal with than extreme heat).

Phoenix and Las Vegas may be a great place for a secondary data center. But for humans, they are very vulnerable to water shortages, and power outages during the summer can be deadly. I have seen them referred to as places people weren't meant to live, more than once.

People can and do live in Phoenix. Yes it’s unpleasantly hot, but anyone who claims it’s unfit for human habitation is exaggerating.

> for humans, they are very vulnerable to water shortages, and power outages during the summer can be deadly

These are both mitigated with on-site reserves.

Salt Lake City is about to be devastated by the drying up of the lake.

> there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable

Sure. That doesn’t mean you can’t mitigate damage.

Not e.g. building on the Houston flood plain is one such example [1].

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...

You wouldn't think you'd need to point out building on the water side of a levee is a bad idea, even for a "dry reservoir", but here we are.

Huston regularly gets battered by hurricanes.

Nobody wants to live here, but Ohio is pretty safe. There are tornadoes but they're very localized and not common. Really not much else to worry about, aside from being in Ohio of course.

South Texas? We lived in San Antonio for last 5 years, and the weather does not really get extreme. Well you get consecutive weeks of 105-110 highs in summer. But it is far enough from the gulf coast so no hurricanes, and apart from the 2021 snowpocalypse, we didn't get any extreme weather. Austin is also okay. If you get too far north up to Dallas you start to get the snowstorms and tornadoes though.

Phoenix and Tucson are pretty mild for disasters. There are sometimes violent storms in the late summer but nothing that ever rises to the level of requiring evacuation as far as I know.

On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.

Yea, the potential disasters in the south west are mostly man-made in the sense of underinvesting in the electrical grid to make sure the months of 100+ degree high temps don't kill you, or a snap freeze in the winter doesn't take down power either.

The lack of a real need for natural disaster planning feels like it's left local governance complacent about issues that would barely be a problem anywhere else. I know folks in Dallas, Houston, and Austin who have been without power and water longer from a few hours of freezing rain than folks in Florida that got direct hit with a Cat 4 hurricane. There's certainly disasters that you can only do so much prep for, but there's rigor that comes with having to prep for something that generally helps you not totally fall apart when more minor stuff happens.

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