OKC, OK with F5 tornadoes. Only affects small portions of the city at a time, tho. It’s just that when you (recently) get one with 300+mph winds, and one with a 2 1/2 mile wide footprint, and any other number of ‘special’ things about other storms, it sticks in the community mind.
Several small communities along the Trinity River in TX have rebuilt after destructive floods.
Fort Collins, CO had the Craft Brew Beer Shortage one night when I lived there. Devastating.
.
Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Moscow, London, Berlin, Dresden, Coventry… the list is very long.
The lovely story of Times Beach, Missouri, featuring crooked company NEPACCO, disgraced and jailed Reagan appointee Rita Lavelle, of “Sewergate” fame, and the creation of new laws designed to prevent Toxic Waste dumping.
Ah! That explains why the Spanish-owned What Is That? Oh, It’s A… Bank? of that name has a stylized fire as its logo.
Or not. They’re a little creepy, in any case.
Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 destroyed most of downtown.
I was just in New Orleans. It is doing OK, but still recovering. We stayed in a hotel that made it through the hurricane ok, but the building next to it is still abandoned 10 years later. They have a ways to go, but they are recovering.
Similarly, The London Beer Flood in 1814.
For certain values of “recovered.”
Galveston before the storm was sometimes called the “Wall Street of the South”, as it was the financial center for the entire cotton-farming industry in the South, as well as one of the nation’s major ports. It was the largest city in Texas, and generally a happening place for the late 19th/very early 20th century.
After the storm, which killed roughly 1/3 of the pre-storm population of 37,000 and leveled something like 95% of the city, Houston led an effort to dredge a channel north through the bay and bypass Galveston, leaving it a sort of sleepy coastal tourist town and little sister to their northern neighbor, which is where remains today.
It’s an interesting place though; up through the 1960s, it had large ethnic communities more reminiscent of East Coast cities- Jewish, Italian, German and Greek in particular, and had their own organized crime families on par with those of Chicago and New York.
Also, in one of the more impressive demonstrations of civic resolve, the city fathers built a 17 foot seawall, and ***raised the entire city ***behind the wall up to that level by 1910. So a decade after a storm had leveled their city and killed a third of its inhabitants, they’d raised the city and built a wall to prevent that kind of thing from happening again.
People are STILL whining in New Orleans, and AFAIK, haven’t really done anything to prevent a reocurrence.
Sacramento had annual flooding in the 1800s which caused the original downtown to be impassable. The city fathers finally raised the street level, and you can still visit Underground Sacramento in Old Town.
Similarly, the city of Atlanta was burned/destroyed during the Civil War and recovered to be a major transportation hub and business center. The city motto is “Resurgens”, Latin for “We are rising”, and it’s symbol is the Phoenix rising from the ashes.
It’s just past the 50th anniversary of a tornado that on June 8th, 1966, wrought massive devastation here in Topeka Kansas.
It would now be called an EF5, and at the time, doing damage over $100 million dollars, was the most costly tornado.
Thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed, the city bus barn, a small airport, and every building on the university grounds was either damaged or destroyed.
At that we were lucky. If the path of the storm had been just five or six blocks further north, both main hospitals, Stormont-Vail and St. Francis, would have been taken out. A large piece of something, said to be a house, damaged the state capital dome.
Things were rebuild quickly and now it’s just a memory. But for my then eleven year old self it was scary beyond belief.
The news journalist Bill Kurtis was then a law student at Washburn University. He’d even already accepted a job in Wichita, Kansas, pending passing the bar. But that night he anchored the weather reports at WIBW, and his calm on-air demeanor, along with the plea “For God’s sake, take cover!” is credited with saving many lives. It sure changed the course of his life, after network execs took notice of him.
Philadelphia and the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793. 10% of the population died and almost 1/2 fled the city.
The city recovered, but its status as the largest city in the fledgling USA would founder as a result.
Barneveld, Wisconsin was hit by an F5 tornado in 1984:
They rebuilt. 30+ years later, things are pretty much normal; the population of the town now is about double what it was when the tornado hit.
Most of downtown Boston went up in flames in 1872. Great Boston Fire of 1872 - Wikipedia
Pompeii didn’t recover.
Nashville experienced epic flooding in 2010, damaging many of her touristy spots to the tune of billions of dollars.
Six years later, you would be hard pressed to find any lasting effects.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa experienced a flood in 2008 that crested 12 feet higher than any other known flood. :eek: It happened very rapidly and nobody could have predicted or prevented it. The city is still reeling from its effects.
Joplin, Missouri started to rebuild literally within hours of the 2011 tornado that destoyed a huge percentage of the city.
Every major city in Germany
The anniversary memorials are going up in Portland for the fire I mentioned in my OP. They have put up flame signs around Portland to represent where buildings were lost in the 1866 fire. It is incredible walking through downtown and seeing how far they go.