We had a similar fire during that time, the Archie Creek Fire. Smoke was so bad in the Umpqua Valley and Roseburg that we couldn’t see the house across the yard, some 200 feet away. By pure luck we had some MERV 14 furnace filters in the garage so we went to Home Depot and bought some box fans and lots of duct tape and made some Seussian air filters. They worked marginally well but not enough to keep the inside air clean particularly.
The following summer we had a couple of days of 113-114F temps. I stayed inside and binge watched Breaking Bad.
In November of 1996 western Oregon was inundated with rain and on Nov. 20 a mudslide occurred on a remote mountainside west of Roseburg. At the time the land was owned by several friends of my father (it was kind of a commune thing) and the slide killed 4 people. The following day we – me, my brother, and my father – loaded a bunch of hand tools and chainsaws into the back of dad’s van and went up to help start the cleanup and clear the road. The slide was so big here wasn’t much progress we could make but we spent a day clearing out downed trees and making some semblance of a path to the upstream houses.
Rick and Suzanne (not Susan as the article says) apparently heard the slide coming and told their children to run out of the house, the parents running right behind them. The kids made it out but the slide hit the house before the parents could escape. Rick and Suzanne were literally just a few feet behind their kids, but it was enough that they were swept away by the slide. The kids both survived.
The flooding killed several other people, including a mother and her two children when their car was swept into the river.
I, probably along with several other dopers, were in Phoenix June 26, 1990 when we hit an official all-time record high of 122. It was…hot.
It was interesting how they grounded airplanes, not because they were sinking into the tarmac, but because the flight performance charts didn’t cover temperatures that high.
Do you recall whose record they broke? My college did a massed-kazoo event (Kazoolapalooza?) back in the '80s, but I don’t know if we set a record. As I recall the songs were Also Sprach Zarathustra and Louie Louie. I never could play the damn thing.
My kid was unable to see over the snowbanks for months… I could see over some of the smaller ones. My preference for driving at that time was on one-way streets because they were the most passable. Two-way streets with cars parked on both sides and snow piled everywhere made for cross-your-fingers driving. You couldn’t pull over if someone came the other way, whereas at least if that happened on a one-way, you could honk and wave your middle finger at the Masshole who was driving the wrong way
I was also driving in it toward and past the NYC area. The only bad thing that happened was that the traffic lights were all completely off. No traffic jams for me that I remember. Thankfully, the gas station on the Thruway was on without a line, so I was able to get fuel sufficient to leave the area.
I lived at the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake in 1994. I had just driven home from out of town a few hours earlier, over the overpass that later collapsed. My apartment building was OK (cupbords came down and the interior was trashed) but the buildings on either side of mine both slid off their foundations.
Hurricane Sandy, October 2012, was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record as measured by diameter. It caused flooding and knocked out power for millions in NYC and suburbs. Crews from all over came to help out; we saw companies from North Carolina and Indiana.
We were luckier than some and lost power for just 4 days. We went to stay at a relative’s apartment in Queens, NYC; even though they were in a mandatory evacuation zone near the East River, they never lost power. Friends living 20 minutes from us on the south shore of Long Island had chest- high flooding in their home. Another friend living 5 minutes away had major damage on her home when a transformer was hit by a falling tree and caught fire. Tree damage was strangely random: on some streets loads of trees came down, but on the next block the trees were fine.