If you want to live in California be prepared for Fires and Earthquakes

I have lived in California since I was 4 mostly with a year in Santa Fe, New Mexico at a private school my senior year in High School and a few years here and there in the state of Hawaii where I'm visiting right now.

But, if you are going to live in California you are going to have to deal with fires and earthquakes which is something I have had to deal with since I was 4 years old. It's sort of like wherever you live in the world you have to take the good with the bad. The good is that every single type of place to live almost on earth exists in California from deserts to mountains as high as over 14,000 feet to oceans and surfing beaches, from great ski resorts to beach resorts to desert resorts like Palm Springs and Death Valley. It's all here right along with fires, flash flooding and Earthquakes. It's all part of like in California just like some places in the U.S. get floods, tornadoes, droughts and hurricanes like we have seen.

Wherever you live in the U.S. there are going to be difficult moments from blizzards or droughts or floods or hurricanes or tornadoes or fires or earthquakes or whatever. So, before you move somewhere anywhere in the U.S. do some research so you know what you are getting into. This way you find what you can deal with and what you can't.

For example, the idea of tornadoes and hurricanes scares the hell out of me but earthquakes don't because I have been through so many of them now.

But, I have to tell you being downwind in relation to  a fire is death and I and many other Californians are usually 100% much more afraid of fires than we are earthquakes.

Earthquakes are much more straightforward, we have them all the time and haven't had one that killed more than a few people since 1994 in Northridge. So, what most Californians fear is Fires over almost anything because if you don't have a car and a road or a motorcycle you are ashes blowing in the wind like many people in Northern California are now.

Fires are what Californians fear the most because once they get going if you are downwind you are either a very fast driver or you are literally toast.

There is one more weather event that is hard to get used to in California. We often get 15 or 16 inches of rain at one time with long periods of no rain at all. When you get 15 to 16 inches of rain all at once in a place as warm as California and you combine it with all the altitudes from well over 14,000 feet down to sea level what you often get is flash flooding with cars floating down roads or mud coming down hills or mountains covering homes. This also happens here all the time so be careful where you live or buy a home here because of this. You might be okay for 20 to 25 years in one of these spots and the next day your home is under mud. So, think about this before you buy a home in a flood plane that often gets mud in a big rain of 15 or 16 inches of rain within 3 days.

And of course when fires like we are seeing denude rolling hills they become often in those 15 or 16 inches mud slides that also bury homes. So watch what happens in places like Sonoma, Napa, And Santa Rosa around sloping hills this winter if we have any heavy rains before the underbrush grows back within the next few years.