Even if you find your perfect location there is no guarantee it will stay perfect.

One county over a family set up their rural paradise. forty acres with a spring on site. A well built house, barn and machinery shed. A half dozen cattle and a couple score goats. A large garden that looked to be most of an acre.

Problem popped up when a couple of years into their homesteading exercise, and unknown to them, a small agricultural chemical concern set up shop a short distance upwind of their little bit of heaven. They had a small and nondescript warehouse full of fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides. Which produced a toxic cloud when the warehouse caught fire one night.

All the people got out alright. Most of the animals were poisoned and a few died. Most unfortunately the land was made semi-permanently unsuitable for grazing and crop cultivation. Even the stream was made unusable. Speculation is that the land will detoxify itself in a decade or so. They tried to sue the company but it is owned by a couple of small-time farmers who have nothing. Insurance company claims the fire started from a lightning strike and so it is 'an act of God'.

Sometimes you can't win for losing. Life is hazardous, 'You pays your money and takes your chances', and nobody get out of here alive. You do the best you can and accept the fact that your not entirely in control and that, in the end, we will all slip and fall. The best you can do is stack the deck in your favor a bit.

Now isn't that typical?

You're right though, no getting out of life alive. I guess thats why most people have children, to create a legacy...

Not for me though.


Blitz

I don't know about this.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9131261/

Opinions?

Blitz

I'd have to say my house is about the safest place i can think of. Located on a mountain in a small rural town in northern Alabama, a few miles from the Tennessee River. Water was never a problem, even with the recent drought conditions. Our whole neighborhood is wooded, so we could probably live off wild edibles for at least a few months, and our next-door neighbor has chickens, so we'd have eggs if nothing else; or we could eat his guineas. During my lifetime there've only been a few incidences of theft, and those were all by the same pair of punks who have long since moved to another state. I don't remember ever hearing about a murder(this IS rural AL, so that probably has something to do with the law of common sense that says "noone ever tries to massacre at a gun show.") The last time we had truly serious weather was in 1997 when an ice storm knocked out the power for a few days. Being on the highest point of land, flooding isn't a worry. There's never been a tornado within twenty miles of us. i don't think there's ever been an earthquake here in recorded history. The only thing i'd worry about is the Brown's Ferry nuclear plant, but the odds of that ever being a problem are virtually nil. It could be a potential terrorist target, but with all the other things to bomb in this country, I can't see them bothering with it; it just wouldn't kill enough people. I don't know how fast fallout would travel, but i think it would take long enough to cross the 28 mile between us and the plant for us to bug out.

Apparently, in that article at least, "safety" only related to natural stuff, i.e. weather. Silly me, I think that there is more to safety than natural disasters. The homicide/rape/assault/burgulary/other crime rates mean something to me also. Why live in a location with no severe weather if you are afraid to go to the store after 3pm???

Home, protected by the beast...

Well, I agree that the list does discount everything that isn't directly related to nature. Still although they didn't put it on there, they did get close to where I believe the safest place is, factoring in the other safety issues as well.

If you include crime and the recklessness of others, then you can certainly take Yakima and Spokane off the 10 best list. I doubt they'd even make the top 100.

Crime is a concern. But crime rates can be both deceiving and quite variable.

Crime can be a quite local affair. You can look up the crime rate of a city and easily overlook that the crime is largely limited to a few neighborhoods and a relatively small sector of the population. Stay out of those few blocks and from around those people and your actual risk is far less than what the crime statistics would otherwise suggest.

Even in the wrong neighborhood and among the wrong people there are some subsets of people who defy the statistics. Awareness, attitude, how you look and what your role is in the area can shift the odds in or against you. Nobody is entirely safe but some people consistently beat the odds.

Also it has to be noted that some of the worse, bloodiest and most egregious crimes have happened in rural areas. Areas with low crime rates and where people thought they were safe. When things go south in an isolated area they often go bad in a very big way.

Also crime is shifting. Gangs, under pressure from police and looking for easy pickings and gullible youths looking for thrills and acceptance, are moving into the rural areas. Marijuana growers and meth labs have also moved into the countryside. Some rural counties, areas which had little or no serious crime, now have higher violent crime rates than nearby cities. Cities that are still assumed to be more dangerous.

I don't think people can draw conclusions without careful study. Even if your relatively safe from street crime now it doesn't mean a gang or meth lab won't move in and change things. Unfortunately poor rural counties seldom have the resources to effectively deal with a crime wave.

That's why I will build my house with the same mindset as a spider building a web.

Here is some info on crime within the U.S. states and which ones have the worst rates. New Hampshire is said to be the safest, while Nevada is the worst, in this regard. http://www.cqpress.com/product/Crime-State-Rankings-2008.html