After the hurricane hit, my wife (born in Indiana) asked "does the Twin Cities have any huge natural disasters like this?".
Hm.
Tornados - devastating but not enough to knock out infrastructure city-wide.
Floods - enough variance in elevation to preserve the city.
Earthquakes - The New Madrid fault is the closest, but it would have to be a Richter 12+ to have any effect here.
Nonetheless, I've been wrestling with the issue of the folks who refuse to leave in New Orleans. If you've watched coverage, you'll realize that there are huge sections of the city with no damage except loss of electricity. Folks have stockpiled water and food to last them for months, and they're far away from the stagnant water.
If you were in that situation, where some other side of town was nuked but you had provisions, would you fight the troopers coming to pull you out?
Personally, I'm thinking that folks just simply don't trust the gov't to leave their stuff alone. Who could blame them? Things were botched so badly I'm sure they're worried they'll come back to a bulldozed house.
I like how Nagin ripped the feds a new one, but frankly he's no favorite of mine. Sure he's a Democrat, but he's a Lieberman-Zell Miller Democrat. Blanco's not much better. From my limited, gov't-censored view, it seems like people could stay in undamaged areas.
BLink