How can you live below sea level and consider yourself safe from tsunamis? I am 200 feet above sea level and I am safe from most, but not all, T's......

You must be sheltered behind a really massive dike.

We do have a 1/100.000 failure norm on our water defences, which I think is the highest standard in the world. Dykes are also setup in rings (due to the fact that our rivers are also higher than our groundlevel), so one failure will only compromise a ring.

I did choose a apartment on the 3rd and 4th floor just in case.

Related.

MIAMI — Maureen Miller was among the 2 million people ordered to evacuate coastal areas in the Southeast ahead of Hurricane Matthew. Her family and their dog spent two nights in a hotel and struggled through police roadblocks to return.

When they finally got back, their Brunswick, Georgia-area home was unscathed. Now they wish they had never left.

“I will never evacuate again,” Miller said. “If we stayed, we’d be fine. I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way.”

Weather experts and government officials worry that people who quickly packed up and left but whose homes sustained little or no damage might be reluctant to evacuate next time, leading to deadly consequences.

I will never evacuate again

Oh the horror! Two nights in a hotel....If you don't care for the dire predictions of an overprotective government, consider living in Haiti. I don't believe those good folks are burdened with such conditions.

I am faced with a probable/possible evacuation scenario with wildfires near my urban neighborhood. I start preparing to leave as soon as I smell smoke and if an evacuation is recommended, much less mandated, I will be on the road right away (unless my own appraisal suggests leaving earlier). Preservation of life is all important and the dwelling is just stuff and can be replaced (I do have insurance). Leaving the area frees personnel to concentrate on stopping the fire, unburdened by the need to save the clueless.

In sum, many Americans refuse evacuation orders because they don't like being less comfortable for a couple of days. They prefer to take the risk of putting their lives in jeopardy.

IMO it's not about comfort. Many folks in the zones know there is a risk, but they've been through hurricanes with minimal to zero damage and feel they have good enough information to make a decision on their own.

The over-cautious nature of government causes the mind-set of taking what emergency-bureaucrats say as simply one of many inputs. Straight up, the evacuation of south Florida due to over-warning in preps for Hurricane Matthew will cause more people to disregard warnings for the next big hurricane to threaten south Florida.

Politicians & bureaucrats are pummeled for not making those over-cautious warnings ahead of serious storms, so they lean toward being over-cautious -- the only risk is a false alarm and they can live with that. However, the only warning some people will listen to is the last hurricane. After Katrina people took those warnings a little more seriously and then we had a few false alarms and people forgot Katrina. Matthew is another false alarm for south Florida and next time more people will disregard the warnings -- until the next major blow hits Miami and nice boats get piled up on each other in the marinas.

It's a cycle of over-warn/regard/disregard/get wiped out/start listening to the warnings again. For some people the cycle is vicious.

And after the storm puts them in life threatening trouble, those same people who refused to evacuate because the government was being "over cautious" will no doubt whine, snivel, and complain that the "inefficient" government took too long to rescue them.

Yep, the only way the emergency-bureaucrats come out looking good is if they issue an evacuation order and that area is directly hit. If they don't issue the warning and the area is hit, they didn't do their job. If they issue the warning and the area doesn't get hit, they were overly cautious and people are critical because they evacuated for no reason.

In my country the politics get involved. The end decision is made by the mayor(s). I have seen lots of the overly cautious decisions, but also:
- Gamble things will be fine (extreme weather, in this case he was lucky)
- Wait until the very last minute to order evacuation (the longer you wait, the more certainty), making it practically impossible to do correctly.

Normalcy bias, if it is not real to them, it has not happened in a way that was close to them personally, then it is unlikely and they prefer to stay in as normal a routine and situation as possible.