Hazards

9/11... Katrina... South Asian Tsunami...

These words evoke powerful feelings. They cause us to worry about our own safety and wonder what dangers we face in Seattle. This section of our website explores risks we face here. It is one of the few places you can get a comprehensive overview of all the hazards facing our city. We hope you will spend some time here to learn which hazards pose a significant threat and can learn what you can do to decrease the risks by turning to our "How Do I..." section.

Not all hazards are created equal

We all face hazards every day, but most of us do stop to think about them. We accept them as a normal part of our lives. Yet, others keep us up at night. Ironically, the ones we that most trouble us are often less harmful than the ones that we accept calmly.

Experts tend to rank hazards differently than the rest of us. There are a lot of hazards that worry people that experts tend to dismiss. Experts tend to equate risk with fatalities. Most lay people use a more complex system. We consider at least eight factors:

1. whether the risk is voluntary,
2. whether the outcome is immediate or not,
3. how much we know about it,
4. how much control we have over it,
5. how new it is,
6. how many people it affects at one time,
7. whether we dread it, and
8. the severity of the consequences.

Using these measures most of us worry the most about hazards we don't have any choice about, can't control, that harm many people suddenly in a horrible way, and which we know little often because they are new. When these measures are included one can see why many people worry more about earthquakes than wearing seat belts.

Disasters: Risks to Our Community

Large scale natural, social and technological hazards rank high on many of these hot button measures. We have little control over whether they occur. They impact large groups of people catastrophically and suddenly. Often even the experts know little about them and the exact effects are hard to predict. Together these factors make us nervous.

We all depend on our community: complex networks of relationships and infrastructure. Disasters are a threat to the community. Even people who are not directly affected by a disaster can suffer because of poor transportation, closure of key facilities and economic decline. This site provides you with better information about nature of the threats we face as individuals and as a community. We hope you can use it to make choices about how you prepare to reduce the risk you face to a level that is comfortable to you.