I have lived most of my life in California, with the exception of a few years in New York and Houston. I was always amused by the fear of earthquakes expressed by people who are regularly challenged by blizzards, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Sure, you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but my house withstood a 7.2 whopper in December 2004. No damage, just a few things bouncing off shelves.
National Geographic just published an interesting chart recounting the odds of dying a certain way. Obviously, your odds of dying are 1:1. Here are some samples:
- Heart disease: 1 in 5
- Motor vehicle accident: 1 in 84
- Motorcycle accident: 1 in 1,020 (many fewer people ride motorcycles in the US)
- Air/space accident: 1 in 5,051
- Hornet, wasp, or bee sting: 1 in 56,789
- Legal execution: 1 in 62,468
- Earthquake: 1 in 117,127
- Fireworks discharge: 1 in 340,733
Not mentioned on the list is my favorite, shark attacks. Why is this a favorite, you ask? Just because it sounds like one of the scarier things that could happen, but it hardly ever does. I found a great site at the University of Florida, with the following number of deaths in the USA in 2005:
- 4 deaths due to shark attacks
- 28 deaths due to dog attacks
- Mountain lions and snakes kill more humans than sharks do.
UFL estimates your odds of being killed by a shark as 1 in 264.1 million.
The point is that life is risky, and we’d be better off watching our cholesterol than stressing about sharks, airplanes, and earthquakes.
Social psychologists usually account for our reactions to perceived risks using the availability heuristic [1, 2]. We use the ease with which a scenario can be imagined when we judge its likelihood. Somehow, it just seems easier to imagine dying from a shark attack than being killed by a dog.
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207-232.
- Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1130.
4 Comments
cableguy · December 9, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Hi Dr. Freberg,
You made the same statement in class that you would rather face an earthquake, any day, over a tornado. I think this is funny b/c I am the exact opposite. Here’s my humble logic. First of all, I’m a corn-fed midwestern boy by origin. Tornado alerts and warning were a normal part of my childhood, including standing outside in bad weather hoping to spot one. When a tornado comes, you normally have several advantages over facing an earthquake. The most obvious is a warning. Its very unusual for a person to be caught off guard by a tornado. Tornado warnings give time to prepare, whether its getting down in your basement (a common feature of midwestern homes) or getting in your car and leaving the area. There is still no reliable technology to predict an earthquake. It just happens. This leads me to my second point, you can actually take actions to protect yourself from a tornado. People have been saved simply by lying in a road side gulch. Of course, there is the basement tactic or even driving out of the area, as already mentioned. I would say there is very little effective action you can take to protect yourself against an earthquake. Lastly, damage from a tornado tends to be concentrated; tornados cut a swath of damage. Whereas, earthquake damage can be very widespread, affecting hundreds of square miles and thousands to millions of people. Don’t forget, earthquakes cause tsunamis also. The most devastating tornado I could find was a tri-state, multi-twister storm in 1925. The death toll was 71 people. Earthquakes? Well, there are too many to list in which hundreds or thousands of people have died. I was iving in Europe in 1999 when >18,000 people were killed in the Incirlik, Turkey quake. San Francisco? 1906: >3000 people killed.
With all that being said, there is one advantage of being in an earthquake over a tornado, that I can thing of: earthquakes last a mere seconds. Still, give me a tornado anyday! Have a great Christmas! -will
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