I’m not refering, here, to specific events, like the Northridge Quake, or Krakatoa, or Hurricane Andrew. I mean, what’s the worst type of natural disaster?
Are earthquakes worse than hurricanes? Are flashfires preferable to mudslides? Would you prefer to live next to a volcano or in the heart of twister country?
I am, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, excluding famine and plague. Also meteor strikes, the sun going super-nova, etc. as outside the bounds of human expierience.
My personal worst/best:
Best: Earthquakes, although as a native Californian I may be biased here. I’ve survived plenty of earthquakes.
Worst: Tornados terrify the living f**k out of me, possibly because of their close association with Helen Hunt. Although fire is very nasty… Call it fire by a nose.
Tornados for me, too. I know my fear is way out of proportion considering the relative danger of them versus, say, a big earthquake or a volcano, but it’s beyond logic. If there is a tornado warning anywhere near my area I nearly freeze in panic. I dream about them with unhealthy frequency. If I saw one in real life I would probably die of fright before it ever had a chance to hurt me.
Same here…and until you’ve ever lived thru one…holy g’damn shit. I tell you what, I’ve lived in Granite City, Illinois…right nexta East St. Louis…I’m one’a the few whitey’s who’s probably ever walked outta there alive…I’d go back again instead of tornado’s…mostly 'cause I can dance…bigtime!
Volcanos
In the 19th century Krakatoa erupted and it was heard thousands of miles away, tidal waves were extraordinarily catestrophic. Thera, now the island of Santorini similarly went kaboolie sometime in the second millenia B.C. Destroyed the whole island (it was rather inhabited, unlike Krakatoa) and sent out a tidal wave across the Med Sea estimated at 300 feet high washing miles inland and killing zillions, or so it is thought.
Of course, a six mile wide asteroid wiped out most life on the planet 65 million years ago. And a few billion years before that a bigger asteroid wapped into us and knocked off enough dirt to eventually form the moon.
I live in California, and my family has for well over a century, so I’m partial to earthquakes. If you are in a roomful of people when it hits, remember that nothing will happen, play it really cool and people will think you are insanely brave. In the 89 quake (Oct 17 if I remember correctly) I was in a Safeway and did just this as all the stuff came off the shelves, and me in my suit on my way home from work. Stuff flying everywhere, zillions of bottles on the floor. But fairly modern building. People screaming for their lives. They look at me afterwards like I was nuts. (In 06 grandma had the house come down around her and family). I can still remember thinking on my walk home that was a pretty big quake. My next though was, I wonder where the center was. And my next thought was, gee, I hope it wasn’t centered in LA!
I think floods kill more people than anything. They also do terrible damage to anything in their way. Not much you can do to prevent them or floodproof your house (other than not building in a floodplain but that’s another thread).
I live in WI and we get a few twisters every year. I’ve seen 2 in person and they are an amazing sight (from an adequate distance).
When I was 16 I was at my GF’s house with her, her two younger sisters and younger brother. Her parents were gone somewhere.(Her father was a cemetery caretaker and the house was just outside of town, the only house on the cemetery property). I don’t know if we were even aware of the tornado warnings, but all of a sudden we were in it. We rushed down to the basement(NorthEast Ohio, everyone had a basement) where I wound up with four people literally hanging on me screaming while we heard the windows breaking upstairs and trees snapping like shotgun blasts. Fortunately, it was a small tornado and while there was a lot of wreckage, I can’t remember anyone being killed.
On the 17 October earthquake, my SO and I happened to be in about the best place possible. We were halfway up Mt. Diablo, lying on a blanket with nothing heavy over us except a tree or two. We ran to a little meadow with nothing near us when we felt the first shock. When it was over I grinned at Barbara and said,“Good one, eh”?
Then a ranger came down the trail and said,“You’ll have to go. The bay bridge has collapsed”.
We just stared at her. Of course the whole bridge hadn’t collapsed, but that was the first report.
Anyway, if I had to pick one, I’d rather not be in another tornado.
I can’t find any further links, or rather I find too many unrelated ones, but things like the collectivisation of farms in Russia under Stalin and in China as part of the Great Leap Forward which took the lives of tens of millions.
Earthquakes scare me the most. Most other natural disasters give some kind of a warning, but we still have no way to predict major earthquakes. Also, they cause very widespread damage so there is little hope for immediate help/rescue. What do you do if an entire city is burning? The death toll of the Kobe earthquake a few years ago was about the same as that of the WTC attack.
I think a “Mother of Storms” hurricane would be the worst.
“Mother of Storms” was a book whoose author i cannot remember. the hurricane was created when an experimental weather control device malfunctioned and exploded, triggering a giant hurricane. it got up to tornado winds at the eye’s edge.
the hurricane absorbed two other hurricanes and jumped mexico. the first time it absorbed another hurrcane it was in the atlantic, and it coughed up a hurricane that rolled up the eastern seaboard causing immense damage. the second time it hit another hurricane it was in the pacific, and it threw a hurricane backwards at north mexico/california, where it died.
after that, the main one cruised over hawaii, scraping it bare, and rolled on to exahust itself over japan and china.
Not the worst in terms of overall destruction, but for downright spooky natural disaster the sudden expulsion of carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 certainly rates.
The natural disaster I’m most phobic about is the tsunami. I can’t even watch those Discovery Channel programs about them, they freak me out so much. I have had several nightmares about watching a wave of water rise up from the ocean and falling on top of me. I saw Deep Impact on an airplane, and I so wished I could have turned it off when they got to the tsunami part. :: shivers :: Hurricanes look pretty bad to me, too. Every time I see CNN footage of plam trees being whipped around, I make yet another mental note to never move to Florida.
I’m a native of California, and while the prospect of earthquakes doesn’t exactly chill me to the bone, I’m not as cavalier as some people in this thread. I was eleven in 1989, and felt imaginary earthquakes for years afterwards. The Loma Prieta earthquake was a major landmark in my life. I still think about it pretty much every day. If I happen to look at a clock at 5:04, I shudder.
We were there in Mountain View during the Loma Prieta Earthquake too. I have great shots of San Francisco from the next day. When the Attack on 9.11 happened, I could still remember the silence, the smell of gas leaking, the absolute stillness…the shaking you feel in your thighs. Enough, very disturbing.
My theory is that everyone is exposed at some time to a natural disaster. And the worst natural disaster is…an ugly baby. YIKES! :rolleyes:
