I always want to laugh when an inch of snow causes traffic jams and panic in Texas or Florida too, until I remember that driving in the snow takes a lot of practice, but a 5.8 can cause significant structural damage when the building aren't designed for that, and if big slab of concrete falls on your head or you're trampled in the stairwell by panicked people who've never experienced a tremor of that magnitude the actual measurement on the Richter Scale is somewhat irrelevant.