Who has been in a natural disaster? How was it? How many have you been in?
I have been in two typhoons. I was really young at the time (4 and 5) so I think I was too stupid to be afraid. Both happened while I lived in the Phillipines. The first one happen shortly after we got there so we sat around on crates in our new on-base housing with no power and watched the palm trees bend over a lot.
I live in Oklahoma for a long time but never was ‘in’ a tornado. For a tornado I think debris must land in your yard to count. Of course if the house you were in was knocked down that counts too.
So, What natural disasters have you been through.
The person who has been through the most will of course have bragging rights.
Been in a tornado once, with 6 inch hail (yes, really!) Been in a 6.1 earthquake once. I survived.
Now, time for a joke.
Two businessmen are flying first class to Fiji. One of them says, “My entire factory was wiped out in a fire, but the insurance covered everything, and there was even enough left over to pay for a nice vacation in Fiji.” The other one says “wow, the same thing that happened to me, except my factory was wiped out in a flood.” The first guy replies, “That’s amazing. How do you start a flood?”
I was in L.A. in 1994 when the Northridge quake hit. Weird. But I’d rather deal with that than a tornado – I don’t want to see possible death coming at me. At least with the quake I didn’t know it was coming until BOOM it woke me up. During it I was waiting for the ceiling to fall and kill me already, but it didn’t.
Of course, we got off lucky, nobody got hurt and we didn’t lose anything more than a microwave. And we got really good at estimating the magnitude of aftershocks. That got to be fun after a while.
Well, having lived in California for more than twenty-five years, I’ve expierienced my fair share of earthquakes. Hardly notice them, anymore.
There was a flood here in '82, maybe '84. Me any my folks had to be evacuated from our house in a motor boat. When we went back, the mud was a good three, four feet up the wall.
My uncle is a contractor, and as a result of the Oakland hills fire, he is now a very, very wealthy man. A few days after the fire, he presented me with a three foot stream of hardened steel that used to be somebody’s Volvo.
I was in LA for the '94 Northridge quake as well. Pretty freaky shit, especially since it’s the ground moving, and the ground is the ONE thing that I think should NEVER move in such a way. It’s supposed to be solid, but when an earthquake happens…
New York City earthquake survivor here. Think I’m kidding? Read all about it here.
O.K., I didn’t even feel that one, but I remember on in 1983 or '84 that made the roof of our house wave back and forth. All the neighbors ran out into the street (It was late at night) look at each other, sorta shrugged and went back inside.
Not so much a natural disaster as it was a collective WTF?
We lived on top of Kilauea Volcano for about 8 years and experienced thousands of earthquakes. The argest for me was a 6.9 and a 7.2 on the richter scale back in the 70s. We also had Hurricane … forgot the name back in 84, and Iniki back in 92 but luckily I was away at college when it happened, but my sister had a lot of fun running around in the rain I’m led to understand. But all in all I’ve been very lucky. I mean there’s not much even a 7.2 earthquake can do when you’re house is a well built simple wood sturcture except maybe throw it off the foundations and break knick-knacks.
There was a tornado in my county in New York a year or two ago. We could see the cloud from the front porch of our trailer, but luckily for me it skipped over us and demolished some houses down on the river. I’ll never forget the color of the sky…
I’ve been in several blizzards that caused a state of emergency to be declared. But I’m used to that, and it doens’t seem like it should count.
I also remember one mild earthquake about ten years ago that made the metal railings of my grandmother’s second-floor apartment building ring. I thought someone was beating the railing with a baseball bat.
And, of course, it seems like every earthquake centered in the Pacific rim sets off a tsunami warning. But we’re still standing.
I would say my most memorable experience was Mt. St. Helens erupting on May 18, 1980. Had been talked about for a long time beforehand, but when it actually happened, it was still difficult to be prepared for. I was in Sunday School at the time (whee!), and so tried to find non stained-glass windows to see outside. It didn’t matter because it was black as night (I think it was around 9:30am). My Mom volunteered to drive the kids in our area to our house, and most of the other adults took charge of driving other kids/elderly people to safe places as well. The air was so thick with falling ash, people were questioning how safe it was to leave. Someone had found some cotton masks, other people were breathing into paper bags. I think I could see roughly 3 ft. in front of me (sometimes more/less). The drive home was awful, and I at one point told my Mom she was driving on the wrong side of the road (4 lane road), when I saw the orange guard rail on a bridge out of the driver’s side. I’m not sure why everyone didn’t stay put, I guess no one wanted to be stuck in church for an unknown amount of hours?? The ash clean up seemed to take forever, once everyone removed it from their roofs, it really had no place to go.
I have also survived a flood, sand bags, the whole bit. It was not an area known for flooding. Our house was one of two houses on our block undamaged by the flooding, though my car was ruined. Luckily, no one was killed or suffered serious injury (including people outside of my family). Since this is getting pretty long, I’ll just add I’ve survived a house fire as well.
There was the snow storm of the century, on Thursday March 4th 1971 (officially 47 cm of snow with 110 kph winds, although I remember much more snow and the medias said at the time something like 60-90 cm of snow). At the time, it usually took me about 1 hour to get to school, the previous Tuesday we had another storm (a median one, I remember hearing something like 45 cm), took me then 3 hours to get to school which wasn’t canceled. So on March 4th, it took me about 90 minutes to get there and learn that school was cancelled, so me and my brother headed back home, it was about 9h30 AM. When we reached home (non stop travelling) it was 4h00 PM. When I got out of my pants, they were frozen stiff and standing by themselves.
Next one, was the flash flood of July 14th 1987, a 2 hours rainstorm that dropped 102 mm (about 4 inches) of water. The Décarie Expressway became the Décarie Canal. Tunnels were flooded, the works.
There was also an earthquake (small) in the late 80’s. Sorry don’t remember the year. That was funny, because it was the first and only earthquake I was in and I was the first in the house to know that it was an earthquake. Ahh, the joys of collecting miscellaneous data !
Let’s not forget the ice storm of '98 which paralyzed the city for about a week (and parts of the province for months).
I experienced the 1989 earthquake of San Francisco (I forget the official name). I remember that it was the opening day for the playoffs in baseball and the pictures on TV of the stadium shaking were unnerving. I was living in Fremont, CA, at the time and was working in Hayward. The quake happened at 5:04 pm , which put me at a stoplight right outside my job. At first, I thought that 4 big guys were jumping on the bumpers of my Ford Escort (but of course I couldn’t see them). I realized that I had just experienced a quake. However, I thought it was a tiny quake on the Hayward fault. This feeling lasted about 30 seconds, when I turned and entered the freeway to go home. There were several car crashes and my car radio was filled with static. I got to my house and my roommates were already there, with their faces pale. We watched the TV and were flabbergasted at the damage. The most horrifying in my opinion was the Oakland freeway. Dying in such a small, enclosed area just freaks me out. With all of our knowledge and technology, Mother Nature always puts us in our place.
I nominate cichlidiot’s Mt. Helen’s eruption to be the most impressive.
I did experience the Blizzard of '77 in Buffalo, NY. I was seven years old at the time, so I mostly thought it was fun and did not take in the suffering it caused for some people. The snow had drifted so high that it covered our garage. It was possible (and my dad let us do this one day) to take your Flexible Flyer into the house, up the stairs, crawl out of the bathroom window on to the garage roof, and then sled down the garage roof, over the drift, cross the street, and end up in the driveway across the street.
I was in LA for the big one in 1971, I was in Oakland for the big one in 1989 (cowering under my desk as tv’s and videocassettes crashed down around me)… and back in LA for the Northridge quake in 94.
It is for that reason I’ll never go to Mexico, India, Japan… :eek:
I was in the Loma Prieta quake in '89. My previous place of employment in downtown Santa Cruz partially collapsed, as did the cafe where I often got coffee. None of my former co-workers was hurt, but one of the young women who worked at the coffee shop didn’t make it through the quake alive. Also, when I lived in Oakland, I regularly drove the stretch of the 880 which collapsed.
I was almost in the Oakland Hills fire.
The most frightening for me was driving over the Tioga pass from Toulumne Meadows in Yosemite to Lee Vining. There was a torrential rain going on and one hillside started giving away over a tretch about a mile long. As I was driving, boulders were rolling across the road in front and in back of the car. Most of them were large enough to easily push the car off the two hundred foot drop on the righ hand side. There was nothing to do but keep driving and hope for the best.
I remember the '71 quake, the '94 Northridge quake, and countless quakes in between. (I was quite young for the '71 quake, OK?) Never had any serious injury or damage. But I do remember my dad cutting his arm on some broken glass, and hitting a vein. Blood spurting everywhere. Had to go to the Emergency Room.
There have been many serious fires in the L.A. area through the years as well. I think it was '93 or so there were the Malibu (?) fires? I am a “petite delicate flower” (no, really) and I get ill from lots of smoke. I remember driving around on the 210 freeway in Glendale, wearing one of those dusk masks over my face. It was that bad.
On June 8, 1966, a huge tornado that later would have been classfied as an F5 went through Topeka, Kansas. I was 11 at the time, and had been watching “Lost In Space” on TV, and, dumb kid that I was, getting annoyed each time that there were weather warnings. Finally, just before the end of the show the sirens went off and my mother, sisters and I went to the basement. Nothing new, we’d done it before, but Mom seemed a lot more tense than usual and we actually hid under the bed this time. Turns out our house was less than a mile from the spot the tornado entered the city. I remember hearing a voice on the transistor radio hollering “It’s coming over the mound”(That would have been Burnett’s Mound in the southwest corner of the city.) Bill Kurtis, the guy who does “Investigative Reports” on A&E, and has been a TV reporter, anchor, and such, was a young law student that summer, doing TV reporting for WIBW in Topeka, and it was his calm demeanor on the air, advising people what to do, and telling what was going on, that got him noticed by the higher ups in broadcasting. At one point, to convey the urgency of the need to take shelter, he uttered a phrase that has become legend in this town “For God’s sake, take cover.” doesn’t sound like much, maybe you had to be there. Later he said that when pased info about the tornado marching thorugh the heart of the city(his wife and daughter were directly in the path of the storm) he wondered what to say to get through to folks. “Do I yell, do I curse, what?” and that’s what came out. He and other WIBW people undoubtably saved a lot of lives by staying where they were.
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