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The Cities Blog
Curtis Gilbert

What’s the worst thing that could happen to St. Paul?

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Just when you thought it was safe to get out of bed again, the St. Paul City Council puts this list on its agenda.

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The charts, which include everything short of a plague of frogs, are part of the the city's All-Hazard Mitigation Plan.

Before you run screaming, it's worth remembering that some of the worst items on the litany of catastrophes are relatively rare. St. Paul hasn't experienced a deadly tornado since 1904, according to the document.

That may explain why even some of the people engaged in the preparing the hazard mitigation plan haven't taken precautions in their own lives to mitigate disasters.

While more than 80 percent of the St. Paul "stakeholders" surveyed agreed it was important to prepare for the hazards on the list, 60 percent admitted they'd personally done no such thing.

"I'd like to say that surprises me, but I really feel like we are a very forgetful nation, or we frankly are so busy and so used to our comfortable lifestyle that we have this concept that those things happen somewhere else." St. Paul Emergency Management Director Rick Larkin said.

While urban twisters may not happen every year in Minnesota, Larkin points to the 2011 Minneapolis tornado as a reminder that the metro area is anything but immune.