I’ve noticed a trend in places I’ve lived, or am living:
I’m from southern Illinois and I lived in southeast Missouri as a child, so that’s tornado alley.
I moved to Havre, Montana, which has deadly blizzards that can cause whiteout conditions for days and completely close roads, not to mention simple high winds which can blow trucks off the freeway. It also gets thunderstorms quite often, but tornadoes are extremely, extremely rare. Oh, and parts of town habitually flood when it rains hard enough.
I now live in Missoula, Montana, which gets the thunderstorms and some blizzards, but is mainly known for forest fires. We have a smokejumping training center at our airport. Every summer, there are times when you can go out and smell wood smoke because there’s a serious fire a few miles away which is zero percent contained. Sometimes, the smoke is so bad the sun is dim and red and being outside for more than a few minutes at a time is a health risk for older people and people with lung disease. You cough, your eyes burn, and there are evacuation orders on the news, because we can’t keep the fires away from the houses all the time and we have planes dropping water and other chemicals and platoons of people with shovels and other tools all working their hardest to save as much as possible, and we have over a century of experience.
And as for places I’ve never lived, California has fire and earthquakes, Hawaii has active volcanoes, Florida has hurricanes and Floridians… so, does the region you live in have periodic or repeated natural disasters?
I first read the title as “does your religion have natural disasters.” That would be a good thread also.
I moved from New York (blizzards and tropical storms) to Cambridge (more blizzards) to Illinois (blizzards and tornadoes and my first earthquake) to Louisiana (hurricanes) to California (earthquakes.)
You can trade off small problems every year, like the East for large problems once in a great while.
I live in the South West of England. We don’t generally get natural disasters - the only kind I can think of is flooding, although this only occurs in certain flood prone areas. I live in a city, on a steep street, so although there’s a river at the bottom of my road, I wouldn’t ever experience flooding.
But earthquakes, sever blizzards, volcanos, tornados? Nope. We had a couple of inches of snow this year (for the first time in 5 years), and the place ground to a halt. We had some visiting colleagues from Reno who thought our reaction was hilarious.
I live on the worst effected area of the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake (worst effected because of the soil profile, not the epicenter of the quake). There will be more earthquakes, someday.
Uncommon tornadoes
Some heavy snow, but nothing that closes major roads for more than a few hours
There is flooding somewhere nearby most springs – though not always an official disaster
For center-north Spain, the closest we get is the occasional heat wave or cold wave. Last year the small village where I have my vacation house broke 36ºC for the first time in recorded history, we’re still in shock. The previous year we’d passed 30ºC, which has been known to happen but hadn’t in 10 years.
For the mediterranean coast of Spain, and the Mediterranean Basin in general, the “cold drop” heavy rains in September can be quite brutal.
Here in California we get droughts, earthquakes, fires…a good chunk of my home town was destroyed by wildfires recently. I still have a breath mask sitting on my desk from then.
The Philippines is hit by about 20 typhoons a year. There’s one right now, in fact. Not all of them will make landfall, but they always bring a lot of wind and rain. Also some welcome relief from the heat. There are also volcanic eruptions; one just ended a few months ago. And earthquakes.
Well yes, but they’re mostly minor. Hurricanes come through, but they usually have lost most of their strength. Doesn’t stop the power from going out but the damage is limited. Providence has hurricane barriers that can be activated to protect against storm surges in Narragansett Bay, but I don’t think they’ve ever been used. The flooding that occurred in the old days may have been mainly due to lack of drainage infrastructure, not the water level in the bay. We also get heavy snow storms occasionally. Everybody here panics if even a single snowflake is seen because of the Blizzard of '76 that left lots of people without power and food, and the streets were filled with stalled cars. Since then we’ve discovered telecommunications and now we know when a major snowstorm is coming like everyone else.
We used to live on a rivermouth, and we’d get a serious flood every three or four years. Because our house and neighbours’ homes were on a little hill, with river and sea on one side, and little valleys on the other, we’d literally be completely surrounded by floodwaters, but the houses themselves would be fine. After a day or two the waters subsided, but until then we were cut off from school, work, and the local shop, and occasionally the electricity would go out too.
I live in Northeastern Minnesota. When my daughter complained about our long winter this year I told her that at least we don’t have hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. We’ll get blizzards or maybe ice storms. But it’s nothing that we can’t just wait out and easily survive. You just don’t want to be driving around in that type of weather. Every once in awhile we’ll get a tornado touch down, but that’s very rare. Lake Superior and our hills protect us from tornadoes. A few years ago we had what was called a 100-year flood. It rained steadily for days and flooding caused a lot of damage in some areas. But apparently, that only happens every 100 years! So I guess I can put up with our crummy winters.
North Alabama here. We get tornadoes every year, and about every 10-20 years or so we get a ‘man-killer’ that costs lives and does major damage. 1989 and 2011 were very bad.
Where I live, we have tornados, blizzards, ice storms, and mosquitos. Sometimes in the same month.
Distinction to be kept in mind: it is a hurricane if it originates over the ocean, and a tornado if it originates over land. It is important to correctly identify what just tore the roof off your house.
Cornwall, England. Aside from the annual tourist invasion, not really.
We got a few inches of snow this year, first time in nearly a decade. It took over a week before the shops had bread again, and the entire county just… stopped. Even many of the pubs shut, and that’s when you know people are panicking.