better disasters

I'm finishing Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World, about the 1906 SF earthquake (happy 100th anniversary, btw). He's a fine, amusing writer but I strongly disagree with his main conclusion. He kind of thinks there shouldn't be a San Francisco; I think that if you only put cities where there's no chance of any kind of disaster ever striking them, you end up, particularly in this day and age, with no cities whatsoever.

At any rate, in his epilogue, he talks briefly about the 1964 Alaska earthquake, which was the second biggest ever recorded. And he mentions that "...throughout the region tsunamis -- one in particular topped with blazing oil from a Texaco tank farm that it had destroyed en route -- came roaring up narrow creeks..." etc.

And it struck me. A flaming tsunami. A wave on fire. Okay, it's an awful terrible thing, but at the same time, that's (if you'll pardon an enthused vulgarism) about the coolest fucking disaster imaginable.

And it made me think about how much more interesting disasters could be if they were more creative. Like, how about a tornado made of lava? Or a flash flood made of molassas (this one's real--Boston (yeah, it would be Boston), 1919, killed 21 people). Or a waterspout laced with a school of bird flu-infected piranhas.

Okay, that's maybe too creative.

If Mother Nature or Gaia or whatever does want to wipe us out, and I hope she does, I also hope she's courteous enough to make it interesting.