I live in California, so I know what you mean (s/weather/earthquake/). People were forgetting about events like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965

Humans have a hard time reasoning about events on decadal time scales.