If you follow the headline news you've been hearing about forest fires in California and Oregon. If you've not lived there you probably suppose the entire area is ablaze. It's not.
A Reuters article for Yahoo News reports on several CA fires, with acreage totaling perhaps 13,500 acres. Thirteen thousand five hundred acres sounds impressive until you realize CA has over 104 million acres. That's about 1/100 of one percent (0.01%) of the state. In other words, most CA citizens are unaware of the fires unless they live downwind and have smoky skies, or listen to local news.
I grew up watching from my front yard as wild fires swept across the brush-covered hillsides of the Los Padres National Forest. Relatives would call (in the day of expensive long-distance rates) to ask if our house was threatened. We'd laugh and say the fire's not even close.
Earthquakes are much the same. Most CA natives have felt a dozen or more, the only people who need to worry about them are those within a few miles of the epicenter. In a state that's 770 miles long and 250 miles wide, that's normally darn few for any given quake. Most quakes occur in rural areas and trouble almost nobody, although millions may feel them as a gentle rocking.
It is a journalistic cliche that CA is disaster-prone. It's a big place so things do happen, but few residents are troubled by most of them. Plus it gets next-to-no tornadoes, no hurricanes, and snow is mostly confined to the Sierras where Californians go play in it.
