Where to go when the world goes to hell?

Some ramblings on supposed safe havens from climate change and nuclear war

Jonathan P. Thompson digital painting.

McKinley County, New Mexico, is the safest place to live in America in terms of natural disasters—even when climate change is taken into account. That’s the conclusion of a recent report from CoreLogic, a property analytics and data firm. Other counties in and around the Four Corners Country, including several in Colorado, also make the least-risky top ten.

Really? I thought when I first read the findings. How is that possible?

CoreLogic had an answer, sort of:

What drives this stability in the low-risk rankings is the fact that these counties have little exposure to hurricane risk and only moderate exposure to wildfire, inland flooding and severe convective storms. While these perils are projected to have an increasing impact on these communities in the projected climate change scenario, the risk remains low relative to the elevated risk projected for other regions.

Source: CoreLogic

Okay, I suppose northwestern New Mexico isn’t going to get slammed by a hurricane anytime too soon and Gallup, the county’s population center, is less vulnerable to wildfires than a lot of Western cities and towns. Maybe floods aren’t that likely, either, except when a uranium tailings pond busts and sends 94 million gallons of radioactive water down the Rio Puerco and right through the county and its main population center of Gallup. While that wasn’t a natural disaster, non-radioactive flash flooding is a real threat in McKinley County and the rest of the region.

As for the other counties on the top 10 safest list, I’d say Summit (#3) and Eagle (#8) Counties, in Colorado, which are basically big wildland-urban interfaces have pretty high risk of damage from wildfires. San Juan County, Colorado, which ranks 9th safest, is probably more prone than anywhere to experiencing disruptions or destruction from avalanches, which are certainly a natural disaster. But the ranking’s biggest oversight, in my humble opinion, is its failure to account for that really big natural disaster: drought. As in lack of water. I can safely say that McKinley County is not safe from drought.

Anyway, this idea of safe havens in the time of climate catastrophe dredged up memories of my youth, when folks were looking for safe havens from a different sort of calamity, namely nuclear holocaust. I had plenty of angst as a teenager in the 1980s (didn’t we all?), but the threat of a nuclear war was by far the most overarching source of existential dread on par with how today’s youth must feel about climate change.

It’s not like I was constantly on edge or actively worried that Ronnie Raygun would push the button. But the possibility of a nuclear attack was always there, lingering on the edge of consciousness. My sixth grade science fair project was to map the likely warhead blast zones in various U.S. cities (you can now do this at the click of a mouse at Nukemap. Yikes). And in junior high my friends and I created a role-playing game called Mutant Wars set in a post-apocalyptic Four Corners Country, which was actually pretty fun to play, if also a bit demented.

I’m sure my friends and I weren’t alone. I’d say a significant portion of the population carried nuclear anxiety around with them wherever they went. And the residue from that trepidation makes it more difficult for my fellow Generation Xers (and from earlier generations) to embrace nuclear power as a weapon to fight climate change. That, and the fact that uranium mining and milling can be extremely harmful to frontline communities.

Source: Oak Ridge National Lab (and h/t to Eben Harrel for the tip)

Thing is, we—the residents of the Four Corners—were supposed to be safe from the worst effects of nuclear war. Or at least that was the conventional wisdom at the time. Because there weren’t any major population centers or missile launch sites or bomb-making facilities, the Soviets supposedly wouldn’t waste their warheads on us. And, apparently, the likely targets were so far away that even the fallout wouldn’t even reach the region.

Even back then I had my doubts, though. At the time, the Four Corners Country was home to several huge coal-fired power plants, not to mention the hydropower-generating Glen Canyon Dam, all of which sent their power to major cities. One well-placed warhead could take out the Four Corners and San Juan power plants in northwestern New Mexico, along with the Shiprock substation (a regional power hub), and another could flatten Navajo Generating Station, Glen Canyon Dam, and associated transmission lines, wreaking havoc in Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, and Albuquerque. So why the hell wouldn’t they be primary targets?

And that fallout map above? It’s directly contradicted by the real-world fallout from nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site not far from Las Vegas.

Maps showing fallout--and the effects thereof--from Nevada Test Site detonations. Sources: CDC, Institute for Environment and Energy Research, "Some Unintended Fallout from Defense Policy: Measuring the Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns," by Keith Meyers.

I mean, if a handful of nuclear tests could spread radioactive fallout all the way across the Midwest, then a full scale nuclear attack would probably send some fallout our way. But you’d be okay if you had read “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” by Cresson H. Kearny and published by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1979.

Kearny introduces his manual with a scolding for those perpetuating a “distorted and exaggerated” myth that nuclear war would virtually wipe out humankind.

Demoralizing? Really? Kearney then goes on to argue that nuclear war is survivable, as long as folks prepared adequately. That made me feel a lot better. And then I got to this passage:

Umm, yeah. No thanks.

I guess the point of all this ramblin’ is that there really are no safe havens, and even if you’ve got the survival skills of Cresson Kearney, life isn’t going to be pleasant anywhere after a global catastrophe, whether it comes from the planet warming by 4 degrees Celsius, or a desperate dictator pushing the button. Prevention is the only option.

This is what surviving nuclear war looks like. Source: Nuclear War Survival Skills.

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Teton County, Wyoming, home of Jackson, does not make the list of safe havens from natural disasters or climate change. It does, however, offer wealthy folks an escape from various state taxes. I suppose that’s one of the reasons the place is overrun by rich people, private jets, and an average single-family home sale price of $5.3 million. Yes, that’s the average sale price. Good luck trying to find a house for less than $2 million and even a condo for under $1 million. It’s possible but pickings are slim.

But instead of reading what I have to say, I’d encourage you to check out Jonathan Schechter’s newsletter. Schechter is a Jackson city council member and runs Cothrive, a project of the Charture Institute. He uses his newsletter to dig into demographic trends in the Jackson Hole and Teton County region. And I gotta say, his findings aren’t pretty—at least not to me. His latest conclusion: Billionaires are now driving out Jackson’s millionaires, and COVID has a lot to do with it.

Here’s one of the pertinent graphs from his latest missive, showing that richer folks are moving in to the area while less well-off (but with higher-than-average incomes) people are leaving. Notice how over time the pattern gets more pronounced.

Source: Jonathan Schechter/Cothrive

Schechter writes:

Add it together, and two things are going on. First, Jackson Hole is pushing its less well-to-do out to surrounding communities, who in turn are pushing their less well-to-do even further afield. Second, those who can’t afford Jackson Hole in the first place are choosing to go to its lifestyle suburbs, where the newcomers make more than extant residents.

Over time, these disparities will greatly increase the economic pressures facing our region, particularly for new housing. Even if scads of new units are built, though, the mounting economic pressures are so powerful that it will make it increasingly difficult for the less well-to-do to live not just in Jackson Hole, but anywhere in the greater Tetons region.

Of course, Jackson is just the most extreme case of what’s happening all over the Western U.S., especially in public lands gateway communities and amenity-rich recreation hotspots, from Durango to Moab to Salida. I’ll leave you with another one of Schechter’s illuminating graphs and another prod to go check out and subscribe to his newsletter if this sort of thing interests you.

Source: Jonathan Schechter/Cothrive