Earthquake after earthquake after earthquake. And I was in LA when the riots happened, not in a suburb 30 miles away watching the whole thing on TV. I could see the fire from my living room window.
Me too. They looted many stores around me (including a gun store on Fountain), burned down some malls, and store owners were on top of their shops with rifles. I showed up to work on the second day to find my place of work was barricaded.
Also: Loma Prieta, Northridge, and Oakland hills fire (but I was in Oakland flats).
Was that the one near the hospital? Next to (I think) a fried chicken place? Small gun store in a tiny strip mall where the streets form a triangle?
9/11 is easily the biggest. I was 25 mi away, had to cancel a freelance music job scheduled for the day after, and could see the smoke from lower Manhattan down the river for weeks. A former client was also among the first few dozen declared dead; he’d worked on a high floor of WTC.
I was part of the big blackout of 2003 in greater NY as well. My train was halted about 10 minutes from home. If I’d’ve been on the next train, I’d’ve been stranded overnight, without my meds. shudder
I was riding my bike at the time, so I didn’t quite get that it was an earthquake. If you’ve ever ridden a bike during an earthquake, you’ll understand. 
Same here, but I was only 15 miles or so to the east.
I could see the smoke from the Pentagon quite clearly from my D.C. apartment, even though it is in Northern Virginia.
Hurricane Juan and White Juan. Fortunately I was living on campus that year–after the hurricane hit we had food (cooked food for that matter–the chicken may have only been lukewarm when we got it, but I’m still impressed) and got our power back after only two days.
All I can say about the blizzard is that all that snow was fun 
I was part of the group of students en route to the hotels where Concorde crashed. Half-an-hour later and our wind band would have been no more. I regard this poor timing as a disaster
- I remember getting off school for it, and it ended up not hitting us.
There are too many of them, and they tend to be small-scale and short-lived, unlike hurricanes.
A tornado came within about a mile of me when I was out riding in a friend’s car, and later when I was hiding in the basement of our house. It was raining so hard, I barely recognized the turnoff for our neighborhood, where I had lived for seven years.
We almost had a tree fall on our house in the Blizzard of '93.
In 1995, my parents and sister went to the Bahamas right after Hurricane Erin had passed through. I was in summer school, and was about to get a rescue party together to go to the Bahamas and see if they were OK. Mom later said the turbulence on the flight in was so bad that she was thinking about what I was going to do with all their money after they died. Turned out they were on the first flight to land after the hurricane.
Y2K.
Doesn’t count?
damn…
The Blizzard of '78 in RI. I was too young to notice that it was a disaster. Interesting that I didn’t think of the '93 blizzard at first. According to Wikipedia:
“New England residents tend to point to the Blizzard of 1978 as their “storm of the century,” due largely to its unrelenting snowfall, which managed to incapacitate the weather-hardened region. Based on barometric pressures, wind speeds and satellite images, however, there is little doubt that the storm of 1993 was the more remarkable of the two.”
We had to evacuate a few miles inland for Hurricane Jeanne last year. We were out of town for Hurricane Frances.
I was in the WTC on 9/11.
The joke answer would be “my social life”.
The real answer – well, New England has been pretty blessed during my lifetime. I remember an ice storm that shut down the state in the early 70’s, the Blizzard of '78 gave us all a week off from college and after Hurricane Gloria in '85, I had to do without electricity for a day or two. But these were all mere hiccups compared to what’s going on down South right now. (If Hurricane Gloria hadn’t broken up while coming ashore, however, it could have ripped Connecticut a new one seeing that it pretty much nailed Bridgeport.)
One more vote for the Northridge Quake and the LA Riots (sort of).
I lived about 6 miles north of downtown LA during the Northridge Quake. My apartment building didn’t suffer any major damage, but it was fascinating being huddled in the hallway on the third floor with our neighbors at 4am watching someone’s portable TV in the dark. I also came within a few seconds of being squashed by stereo speakers I very stupidly had resting on a shelf above my head. Fortunately, the quake scared me badly enough to jump out of bed and go running like a fool, and, of course, one of the speakers was lying on my pillow when I came back.
I lived in the same location during the Riots. My neighborhood wasn’t directly affected (I could see the smoke from the hillside I lived on), but I was going to high school in one of the affected areas (Loyola High School on Venice between Vermont and Normandie, for any locals). We got shut down for three days since the area was surrounded by fires and looting. The neighborhood I grew up in down in South Central also got pretty thrashed. It was pretty somber touring that area afterward.
I have no memory of that storm. I remember that that winter sucked ass, though.
A huge ice storm
A few hurricanes of little consequence
Two tornados
A gas explosion in a nearby apartment complex
All pretty boring.
An ice storm on Halloween in 1991. The only reason it’s memorable is that I was driving hubby back from a doctor visit (200 miles away), and as we pulled into the driveway, power lines across the street fell and shot sparks.
I hadn’t even noticed that the highway was iced over. :smack:
We were without power for about a day, and the only real complication that caused was with hubby’s oxygen.
No real disasters though – some good windstorms in Seattle, a couple of small tornadoes here in Iowa that took shingles, trees, and deck furniture, and a couple of blizzards that caught me on the road.
I feel really, really lucky.
Loma Prieta earthquake, 1989.
Well, in 1976 the apartment building my family lived in caught fire. It was the middle of the night and we were all home. Luckily, everyone got out just fine (except our family cat, who we think died in the fire). I was taken to the hospital and treated for shock: I was fine by the time we got there, but I shared the ambulance ride with a firefighter who had fallen through the roof of the building. He was not fine. 
It’s why there has been a soft spot in my heart for firefighters since I was 5 years old. We lost everything except the contents of one closet; I still have the teddy bear that an American Red Cross volunteer gave me. Not a disaster on any kind of grand scale, but certainly one for those of us who lived in the building.
Other than that, the closest I’ve come is being in NYC on February 26, 1993: the day the World Trade Center was bombed. It was senior year of college, my friend and I were driving from Philly to Toronto for spring break, and we stopped in New York so she could audition for grad school at NYU. On our way into the city we’d had to pull over in the tunnel to let a ton of emergency vehicles pass, but we didn’t find out what had happened until we were waiting around for her audition and a student told us.
I got to experience a tropical storm in Florida once. Wasn’t even a hurricane, but as a small child I thought it was the end of the world.
After that I pretty much kept to chemical explosions. I witnessed the plume of phospherous released by the Miamisburg Train derailment back in the 80’s. Then, two years ago the chemical plant across the street from my neighborhood experienced a slight pressure valve problem which resulted in one chemical tank exploding and another being damaged to the point where we had to evacuate for fear it might become a primative rocket.
One tornado, snow storms, coupla ice storms. Nothing major. The most damage was from the tornado - a tree fell across our driveway. Our neighbor had his roof partly lifted off. There was some damage to the Catholic Church - I think a huge tree fell and damaged its roof. The elementary school also had roof problems. And (the most fun) a silo had something blown into it and still has a huge dent in its upper third.
The ice storms are the worst - snow we can deal with, but ice is another matter. My mom picked me up from school (that was an…interesting…ride home), but some kids were stranded there until 9 PM at night (the busses couldn’t run, you see). Now they call school off instantly if there’s an ice storm. Which isn’t often, so there you are.
Thank you, Anne Neville!