Born and raised near Santa Barbara, CA. A transplant to Nebraska for pharmacy and medical school, then back to CA. Where I shall stay until I die. Now live in SF Bay Area.
Shame on you, Chuck. 'Land of Fruits and Nuts,' indeed! As far as I was concerned, the people in Omaha were nuts. I was driving in downtown Omaha one Saturday, and all these incredibly loud sirens go off; I pull over and park my car, and everyone else is walking around like they can't hear anything.
Talk about 'Twilight Zone!' I later found out that they test the tornado warning sirens the first Sat. of every month.
The really strange thing is the people back there are frightened to death of earthquakes. My second wife, Liz, used to actually run into a doorway and shudder every time she felt a twitch; she was from Colorado. Of course, they rarely cause damage. Tornados, on the other hand, devastate buildings when they hit. One hit in the mid '70's in Omaha when I was there with my adolescent children. We had heard the warning, and were under the crawl space under the house. I heard a noise, and decided to investigate. I saw a tornado, and it was clearly on a parallel course to where we were, so I got the kids to come outside and look at it. It appeared fairly small, with a bunch of shingles flying around.
I later found out those 'shingles' were 4 x 8 ft. pieces of plywood picked up from a lumberyard. I got on one of the kid's bicycles, and pedaled about four blocks from the house. The devastation was enormous, including leveling a one story brick school, fortunately empty at the time.
My kids still kid me about dragging them nearly into the path of a tornado.
So, they call we Californians crazy because we live with the 'threat' of earthquakes? Nonsense. Walt