I'm reminded, I was driving around Northern Spain with a friend and remarked on how few of the hillsides and hilltops had houses on them - in the US this was prime real estate, people with money paid for the view. In this area the best houses were in valley bottoms, near the sea, etc etc. Nice, but seemingly not as nice as being on the hilltop. Inigo said the hillsides were never developed, the land was held out of public ownership for the most part, and that people preferred to live where there was a water system to fight fires. Now, a big factor was Franco - a dictator for 40 years who discouraged most public largesse and who had a society that also discouraged big thinking. But the hills are hit by tremendous wildfires every 50 or 100 years or so, and if not wildfires then winter ice keeps people down low, and then there are infrequent earthquakes. They live in a culture with a longer view, across generations, a social memory of previous devastation that tells them Its Not Worth The Hassle of building up the valley sides. Whereas in the US we've built water supply up hillsides pushing water to places where it generally can't go, they decided generations ago not to do that.

It sounds silly, but I did consider a volcanic lahar when siting my current house, worst case the muck will just lap at the base of the glacial moraine to the south, we have extensive lake shorelines to help protect us. But I wasn't aware of the recently found and chaqrted Seattle Fault, which gives the entire region a 9.0 scale jolt every several hundred years, and our house lies about 150 yards north of it. I am always indifferent to trees, which do the most to prevent flight in windstorms and flooding. Just as I'm sure 350,000 people down in the Green River Valley were indifferent to the potential for flooding when they moved into their homes there, because there hadn't been floods for 40 years since they had develped the Howard Hansen Dam. Now that dam leaks, and those people may be in aworld of hurt this winter. You never know what may transpire to do you in...