Tornados don’t fit into my equation because they can happen virtually anywhere. However we have a hundred plus year history or Houston having catastrophic flooding since its founding. I had a chance to buy a great piece of land locally about 20 years ago. I found that it was in a hundred year flood plain. 4 years later we had one of those hundred year floods and the businesses that eventually were built there. were completely ruined. And it has happened one other time since then. My environmental management professor taught me one thing…NEVER BUILD IN A FLOOD PLAIN. I know 100 plus years ago they didn’t know better in Houston…but they had to know better than to expand the way they did. When I bought my house, I stood in the street and looked up and down, and found the house was on the highest spot on the street. Two blocks south my parents lived on one of the lowest spots in the neighborhood and they had to deal with flooded basements all the time. I have not. THis is why we can’t just develop all land that is vacant, as much land is flood plain or wet land or river valley…and all prone to flooding. The only place I ever question about building with regard to Tornados is the infamous Tornado Alley…where there was a definite consistency reported over many decades. Maybe that strip of the midwest should not not have been developed so much.
