Hurricane Alicia, 1983. Category 3 hurricane. I decided to ride it out in a small (800 sq ft) house. Afterward, I decided never to try to ride out a hurricane again. Nothing happened to us (although a house down the street was skewered by a southern pine), but man was it every scary.
Tropical Storm Allison, 2001. Rain, rain, rain. The water came up almost to my front door before the rain stopped, after which it started falling immediately. Unlike the hurricane, I wasn’t in fear for my life, but I was afraid everything on the first floor that I hadn’t managed to carry upstairs would be lost.
Incidentally, the house that I rode out Alicia in got 5 feet of water in it during Alicia, as did the rest of the street. The owners repaired the damage, but I’m glad I moved.
I was standing under a Boeing 737 that was on jacks when the earthquake hit. The plane was near the center of this big building, as soon as the shaking stopped I ran outside with everyone else.
I was 6 when the Northwest was hit by the Columbus Day storm of 1962. I remember hiding in the basement with my mom and siblings till the storm passed. It took 3 weeks for our power to be restored.
Hey there are enough Loma Prieta earthquake people here we should have a Dopefest. If you click the link, I was five blocks away from the pancaked Cypress Structure/880 freeway. We saw the dust from the crushed cement flow by and had no idea what it was until a friend from Seattle called and asked me if I knew where the Cypress Freeway was. A house two doors down fell off it’s foundation, and the house I lived in was red tagged, although it didn’t suffer any visible damage.
I got stranded in SF after the Rodney King trial when that a$$hole mayor of SF, Frank Jordan ordered BART closed to keep a riot from developing in Union Square.
When the Oakland Hlls fire storm started I was at Candlestick Park watching the Niners beat Detroit when ashes began falling onto the field during the third quarter. I stayed until about halfway through the fourth and got to my home in relatively flat North Oakland and watched the fire march downhill.
On a more personal note, the Apartment I live in, along with one downstairs and the laundry room, was involved in a fire two years ago. We got out fine, but were homeless for nearly two months. The Red Cross put us into a hotel four 3 or 4 days and gave us a Credit Card for food. The rest came out of my pocket. Did I mention I was just starting a business at the time? It was a very scary time for me and my wife, but the kids seemd to get a kick out of hotel living. There’s a post somewhee on the board about it. We’re back in the same apartment today.
I was stationed in Sicily at the time, and we had to launch some P-3 aircraft with search and rescue equipment to look for the crew of a sunken freighter. We never found any survivors of that wreck.
One of my first memories was being a child in Tanneryville PA during the 1977 Johnstown Flood my grandfather saved my whole families lives, by urging them all to get to higher ground on a “hunch”. At least thats how its told now, at the time I was just amazed by how much water went flying down the street, taking all of our toys.
A few years ago, I drove from my then-residence in Orlando back home to Buffalo for Christmas. While I was home, there was seven feet of snow. Not really a disaster, though; it was just gentle but heavy lake effect snow that would not stop falling for days.
I was in LA during the Northridge earthquake of 1987 and here at home in suburban Cleveland and while away at school I’ve lived through numerous blizzards. When I was a kid we had the storms of July 4, 1969.
The first natural disaster I remember that could be called one and that affected me is a blizzard in March 1967 that dumped 14 inches of snow on top of the stuff already there and created drifts three storeys high. It buried our bungalow and shut down Winnipeg officially for two days but left parts of the city paralysed for at least week. People were running out of food but there was plenty of drinking water. No school! Snow week!
In 1987, I was in a bed-and-breakfast in London when the hurricane hit. I had slept through it! and was astounded when I was met by huge, downed trees all over the street and on what once had been cars. But I was awakened in a San Diego motel by an earthquake (relatively minor). I think only one person was killed when a wall of books fell on him.
In the late '80s I got caught in a particularly bad blizzard in the middle of the Manitoba prairie. It and its aftermath killed a number of people. The Trans-Canada Highway had long been closed by the time I drove into the median ditch, thinking I had driven into the one off the right shoulder. I heard a semi pass, so I climbed out of the car into snow up to my waist and galumphed my way out of the ditch and onto the near shoulder. A pickup slowly passed about five minutes later, but the driver didn’t see me only an arm’s length away. He stopped because I bashed my fist against the side of the pickup three times.
I was the third in the cab, and if I looked down at the painted line running along the shoulder, I sometimes could see it because the wind occasionally cleared it of snow. So for about 20 miles and for over an hour I steered until we reached the western outskirts of Winnipeg. I couldn’t get my car for a week. When I did, the underside of the hood had left its impression on the blown-in snow that was packed around the engine like a brick of white coffee. That was the closest I’ve come to death by natural disaster, if a prairie blizzard could be called that.
