My favorite story. We were staying in a motel in Kansas City when a tornado warning came on. The announcer said “There’s a tornado reported on the ground at Highway 50 and Nolan Road.”
The blood drained out of my father’s face as he said “We’re AT Highway 50 and Noland Road” and pulled back the curtain to look outside. Sure enough. . .
The near-legendary (in Britain, anyway) Great Storm of 1987.
Slept through it. :smack:
I live in Louisville, KY. The tornado of 1974 came within a mile of our house, but I was too young to know anything about it at the time.
Hurricane Ike hit us pretty hard in 2008, doing much more damage than a tornado due to widespread high winds. My husband and I were visiting Cave Hill Cemetery when the wind stated picking up. It was a beautiful early fall day to be walking around among the old, tall trees. At first, the wind was invigorating and exciting. Then the trees started creaking and groaning. We started hearing loud cracks and pops all around us, at which point we decided that we needed to get to a more open area. As we were hurrying back to the truck, one of the security guards came by to say that they were evacuating the cemetery. We saw a group of teenage girls walking, and we offered them a ride in the bed of the truck, which they accepted. As we headed back to the entrance, we saw quite a few trees and large limbs down. One went across the road, so we couldn’t get out. At that point, trapped in a cemetery with a bunch of teen girls during a natural disaster, I was pretty sure I was in a zombie movie. Naturally, my husband and I would be eaten and the girls would find a group of boys wandering around. Fortunately, we did find another road out. The city looked absolutely crazy. We drove under a wooden telephone pole that was cracked in half. Two houses and a car on our block were crushed by trees.
4-5 months later, after everything was cleaned up and all the power lines were repaired, we got hit with the worst ice storm in our history. I like to think that the trees that made it through all that can survive anything.
With all the damage that was done in those storms, we just lost a screen door that we were going to replace anyway.
Three tornadoes, a flood, a minor earthquake, an icestorm and more blizzards than you can shake a stick at.
Tornadoes: Palm Sunday of '65, April of '74 and April of '98. The first two were in Indiana and the third in Nashville.
Flood: the great flood of Nashville, 2010. I could almost see another doper’s home from my workplace, where I was, but it would have taken watercraft to get there.
Earthquake: in the mid-eighties, a 4.something tremor hit the area in Indiana where I lived. It startled the bar patrons whhere I worked. 
Ice storm: The one time I went with then-BF out on the truck, we were stuck for four days in Memphis in the early nineties.
Growing up in lake effects snow country, we were seriously snowed in at least a dozen times over the years.
Two Hurricanes: Camilla and Frederick.
I was in Nashville for the 1998 Tornado outbreak. I was out doing things for work, when the my assistant manager called me and said the weather was saying there was a tornado at the intersection I was at right then. There wasn’t, but I managed to make it the mile back up the road to the store. The one from that that hit east Nashville came within 1/2 mile of the store, after I’d made it back.
St. Patrick’s Day Blizzard of 1965. No electricity for nearly a week. Mom turned the oven on low and we huddled in the kitchen. Cat sat on a pillow on the oven door.
Another in the 1980’s we had snow drifts on country roads that were taller than the cars. They were plowed one-way and you drove through the whiteness. I was wearing a light spring jacket, no hat, boots or gloves and drove home from a city about a hundred miles away. Young and careless.
A tornado within half a mile. Dad had just come home from work and I had run down the street to greet him. We stood mesmerized while Mom hollered from the back door.
And a flood in 1967 where I tried and was successful in making it home at the top of a hill in our '55 Chevy. The water was snowplowing up in front of the car. Think I was the last one to make it up that hill and later that evening we could hear the college kids tubing down in the night.
But my most interesting story of bad weather came from my mother who was a country school teacher who survived the Armistice Blizzard of 1940. And she saved the lives of her students.
When she saw the weather was getting bad she took everyone’s lunch away. A smart move as they were stranded there for several days. That way she was able to portion the food out as necessary.
There was a limited amount of wood for the stove and after it was all gone she had to burn the school desks so they could stay warm.
Finally a farmer was able to get there in a manure spreader. He had heated bricks and brought blankets, tucked everybody in and brought them all to his farmhouse where his wife fed them on pancakes until their parents were able to come for them several days later.
She was only nineteen years old at the time. In later years she told me that the thing that frightened her most at the time was the burning of the desks and how angry the parents would be about it!
A few close calls with hurricanes when living near New Orleans in the '80s. Had to drag the patio furniture inside whenever one came close.
Around DC:
Hurricane Isabel killed some of our electronics.
I had a relatively weak tornado go right over my head while waiting for the bus after work.
Heard a loud BOOM while waiting for different bus home from work during a thunderstorm. Near as I can figure, lightning struck the building I was standing under.
Snowmageddon.
Right smack in the middle of all of those. Several times. Add in ice storm, blizzard (from DQ!), and flash flooding.
I have not been involved (in any way, I swear) in a volcanic eruption or a meteor strike.
I was in the Boulder floods just a couple of weeks ago, although I live on high ground not near the creeks. My sump pump worked overtime for four days and kept the crawlspace dry.
My daughter lost two classmates when their car got swept into a boulder. They tried to escape to higher ground and got swept away.
When the remnants of Hurricane Floyd dumped 15 inches of rain on us we had to be evacuated by boat from the second floor of our house.
Blizzard of 1996, Snowmageddon. Hurricane Isabel was somewhat dramatic by DC standards for hurricanes, lots of power outages and trees through roofs.
The derecho was only a disaster because of Pepco.
Let’s see…
End of the school year, 1985. I was on the back of my friend’s motorcycle and we went north from Brampton and passed through the village of Mono Mills near Airport Road and Highway 9. The next day, the village was gone, destroyed by an F4 tornado that was part of the 1985 USA-Canada Tornado Outbreak. Another tornado of that outbreak flattened parts of the city of Barrie.
In 2009 I was on a the first really serious date with my now-ex. We’d just had dinner at a restaurant overlooking Dundas Square in downtown Toronto, and we decided to catch the subway back to my place. We got to Union Station and decided to take the scenic route up to the east-west subway line on Bloor Street. This was the Harbourfront streetcar.
This streetcar runs in a tunnel from Union Station down to the waterfront, then rises to the surface and runs along Queens Quay. As the streetcar neared the end of the tunnel, I noticed water suddenly running along the bottom of the tunnel. The streetcar turned and went up the ramp to the surface, and entered the most torrential rainstorm I have ever seen. The streetcar shook in the wind, and water was leaking around the frames of the tightly-closed streetcar windows, where they met the walls of the streetcar. Drenched riders entered. Yet the streetcar kept trundling along, and eventually we got to the other end of the line at Bloor and Spadina, where we got back on the subway.
Later, after she’d left my apartment and gotten home, we discovered from the news that we had just ridden through the 2009 Southern Ontario tornado outbreak. One of the Newmarket tornadoes from that outbreak had touched down five minutes from her workplace…
This past summer, I was not affected by the freak rainstorm of July; it was on the other side of the metropolitan area. (This is the storm that dropped a month’s worth of rain in two hours, and led to the Marine Rescue squad rescuing people from a flooded train that was nowhere near the lake.) The first I knew anything was wrong was when my Facebook feed started filling with ‘are you okay?’ messages. The storm was that local.
On the other hand, I was in Bancroft and felt the 2010 Central Canada earthquake.
And how could I forget Superstorm Sandy? Toronto is 500 km inland from New York City, behind a mountain range and everything, and we still had some effects.
I was in Harlem during Hurricane Sandy. I could hear loud wind and lots of rain, but the power didn’t go out and there wasn’t much damage where I was aside from lots of tree branches in the street and the bike trail along the river was extremely muddy for about a month. I watched Downton Abbey during the entire thing. I was extremely bummed the next day because I had to go to work.
Hurricane Ivan destroyed my apartment and car. We’ve had a few other hurricanes and tropical storms come very close and cause damage.
Twice I’ve had lightning strike close enough that only the power to my home was knocked out. The neighbor across the street was not affected.
Vermont is about as disaster-free as you can get in the states, but we were hit by the remnants of Hurricane Irene a couple of years ago. I live right by a river, which flooded. The water came halfway up our yard, but our house was fine. Many other houses in our neighborhood were destroyed, though. We were trapped in our house without power for several days by a downed power line in one direction and mudslides in every other direction.
Oh, and I was in DC for the Blizzard of 96, but having grown up in a place that actually gets snow regularly, that just seemed like a silly overreaction to me. It was more amusing than disastrous.
See: January 1998 North American ice storm - Wikipedia
We were without power for 7 days in early to mid January (although quite warm January, hence the freezing rain instead of snow). After one freezing night, my wife and I went to my office where I had a couch. My wife slept, at her insistence, on an air mattress. A friend of mine had power for most of that time and we went there to shower. While there, my dept. chair phoned to say don’t come back; the power was off there too. So my friend made us a palette on the floor and we slept there for four more nights until when I phoned home, the answering machine picked up and I knew power had been restored. The scariest moment was when there was no water for about an hour and a half. That is really frightening. There were also power interruptions at my friend’s but didn’t exceed a couple hours. In a way, it was quite enjoyable.
When we got home, the house temperature was barely above freezing. But I had come by several days earlier to drain the water system. But a 95 year old neighbor and his 94 year old wife had refused to go the shelter and started an open fire in his basement and they both died from smoke inhalation. The city of Montreal had most of its power restored within a week or 10 days, but elsewhere there were places that remained without power for 6 weeks.
Another person from Florida chiming in. I’ve been through a few hurricanes - the worst being Hurricane Wilma. Almost the entire county was without power, and without traffic lights. I’m not saying the traffic lights didn’t work - I’m saying they flew off the lines/poles, so they weren’t evey present at the intersections. I was lucky - I didn’t need a new roof, and I got power back in only three days. The eye passed right over my house - I had about ten minutes outside to clean up debris to mitigate damage for the back side of the storm. Yeah…you should never go outside during the eye. We all did, anyway.
I also went through Katrina, but it wasn’t much when it came through Florida. A friend of mine did lose the roof of his apartment - I helped him clean up, and he crashed at my place for a while afterwards. So technically I housed a Katrina refuge. Didn’t claim the tax benefit, though. 
Once while out on the Gulf of Mexico our boat was chased by a waterspout.