Also recalling that the Mt. St. Helens eruption sent 40-foot walls of mud and debris down the river valleys, scouring away everything and leaving houses, people, cars and bridges buried alive… yeah, I’d be pretty damn terrified by that. Even if you don’t get killed by the initial lahar flows your community would be completely alien and altered, with nothing to eat, no roads, no directions, no nothing.
Forest fire would rate up there pretty highly too, in my opinion, but given the buried-alive aspect, I’d think even a large fire would be outweighed by a sudden avalanche: being awake and aware underneath 2 tons of snow or mud and knowing you’re trapped would be the worst.
I was in L.A. for the Northridge quake. The 10 freeway collapsed near my flat. Scary? Well, it got my attention. Usually I stay in bed, roll over, and go back to sleep. This time I got up. But it was more an adventure than anything else. I wanted to watch the water slosh around in the pool. No electricity all day, but it came on in the evening. No phones, because they were jammed. Stores were price-gouging. No gas, because the pumps run on electricity. But drive a few miles, and you have phones, gas, ATMs, groceries… everything. A bigger quake would be bad, but not nearly as bad as a Hurricane in New Orleans.
I do think there’s a reason why there’s the saying about envying the dead. The worst is of course watching your loved ones suffer. That easily terrifies me.
I’d also say volcanic eruption. You see it from a long way away, coming for you. You can smell it. At night the lava glows and seems much closer then it really is. Hearing it come out of the ground is freaky too, it roars. It also comes with both earthquakes and fires.
I think we’re all used to what ever our locality’s standard disaster is, so that disaster isn’t as scary to us.
Earthquakes? Scary? Say what? It’s over quick (as others have said) and you usually don’t really realize what is going on until after the fact. A huge earthquake (my friends and I consider anything lower than a 5 a “pansy quake,” so a big quake has to be over 7-- pushing 8) would suck, but it is still over quick.
When I was in Illinois visiting family, I about peed myself when the sky turned black and we had to hide in the basement. I was scared because- A: I had never, ever, ever been in a basement before. B: OMIGAWD THERE’S A FRIGGIN’ TORANDO!!! We hung out in the basement for a couple hours; IE: a couple hours longer than I’d like to be scared out of my mind.
I also about peed myself while I was on vacation in Mexico and a hurricane was heading right for the city. The ocean turned all brown and the sky was dark grey, that was scary (for a few days, which is a few days longer than I’d like to be scared).
I’ve only ever been in snow once and I hate being cold, so a blizzard would suck pretty darned hard (mainly because my body is used to 80 degrees in the dead of winter).
Drowning is really scary and seems like it would be a slight inconvenience, so I would rank a flood as the scariest of the natural disasters.
I’ve only experienced earthquakes (having grown up in the Bay Area). A 6+ is the highest I’ve ever experienced though. It was really weird, but not frightening.
Of all the mentioned disasters, I think sink holes seem the most scary. I mean, you just expect the ground to be there all the time. And suddenly it’s not. Most of the others, you at least know they’re coming, you have some forewarning, it seems. Earthquakes and sinkholes…Bam, the earth’s moving under your feel!
Being struck by lightning would be horrible in its aftermath and all, but much worse is the dread building up, when the house shakes or the tsunami crashes through the streets.
Tornado. Nothing worse than seeing, out of the huge looming stormclouds and forked lightning, a giant black funnel cloud ripping up houses and tearing apart trees–and headed your way.
Volcanoes. Pompeii and Herculaneum–need I say more?
Hurricanes. Trannadopers like me, remember that freak storm we had a couple of weeks ago–going on for two or three days. Just half-imagining it makes me shiver to my bones.
Earthquakes are apparently over in twenty or thirty seconds, and I can’t really imagine a tsunami or a forest fire. I was trapped in a sudden snow squall while my family was driving down through the States once, and it wasn’t that bad–just frustrating, being stuck in the middle of the highway.
Me too. Apparently, my mother’s friend’s father froze to death less than a mile from his house during the blizzard of '77. Just the thought of wandering around lost in the cold with the wind blowing the snow into my eyes makes me want to wrap up in a fleece blanket.
To be honest, the most terrifying natural disaster would be the one which happens to me. Everything else is so remote and abstracted by the news media.
Been through tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Earthquakes are the worst by far in my experience because they just HAPPEN. For all the rest, including most volcanic eruptions, you get warning. You can get your butt out of harm’s way. You often have some indication of how bad it’s gonna be.
With an earthquake, you’re just going along, doing whatever you do, and out of nowhere the earth starts moving. Most of the time it’s no big deal - and then sometimes it’s a really big freaking deal - and there is no way in the world you can be prepared for it. Freaks me way out.
I live near Mt. Rainer, but the thought of it going off doesn’t scare me, at least not now anyway. It was more of a fear when I lived in Tacoma.
Earthquakes scare me the most, whenever “The Big One” happens in Seattle, I just hope I’m not on the Alaskan Viaduct or downtown. I don’t really think about it all that much, though.
Earthquakes may go quickly, but don’t forget about aftershocks. I remember when Northridge hit in '94, it started with about a 6.8, and then just a few seconds later there was an aftershock that was almost as powerful and lasted almost as long. The scary thing about earthquakes is that you can’t escape them. No matter where you are, above ground, underground, in a shelter, outside, inside, the earthquake gets you. In your own home, suddenly all your comforts turn into your enemy as you try to avoid being crushed by them. The scariest part, of course, is that you have absolutely no warning, and that they can happen night or day, rain or shine, summer or winter, whenever.
This is coming from someone who’s lived in California most his life. It just unnerves me that potentially at any moment while sitting in my room my whole house could just start shaking and falling apart and then a few minutes later it’s just rubble. At least with tornados and hurricanes you can somewhat come to terms with the fact that this object is destroying property. Imagine how surreal it must be to watch an earthquake from a helicopter or something, to watch a city just crumble for seemingly no reason.
Though to think more abstractly, a huge asteroid impact would probably be the most terrifying, because it would demolish pretty much the entire world. At least New Orleans has the rest of the world to help them (regardless of how ineffectual this help may be…) but imagine being in that kind of disaster and realizing that the entire rest of the world is in that same position or worse, and there’s no hope of anyone saving anyone else.
Back in the mid-seventies I was living in a house near Hilo Bay on the Big Island of Hawaii. About 4 in the morning it felt like a giant had kicked the house. It was just one powerful jolt and it was over. Then about 3 hours later the house starts shaking. Not too bad at first, but soon its really rocking. And it lasted a long time. I first thought I would just ride it out in bed, but soon it felt like the house might collapse. I remembered that doorways are the strongest part of a room so I went for the door, but the room was rocking so much that it really took some effort to get there. The quake just wouldn`t stop so I finally stumbled from sofa to table and other pieces of furniture and made it outside and the thing ended. It turned out to be over 7 on the Richter scale.
The cops came around and told everyone to get out of the area because a tsunami was on the way. The quake also triggered the volcano above Hilo to start erupting. Fortunately, the largest of the tsunami waves came in on the other side of the island and Hilo was spared and the volcano calmed down pretty quickly.
For some reason this reminds me of the commercial with the cows standing in a field. ‘Oh, here it comes!’ (The earthquake comes.) Cows enjoying hoof massage: ‘OooooohhhhhAaaahhhhhhh!’ (Earthquake stops.) ‘They never last long enough.’
I recall a sequence of still photos taken from a fleeing vehicle during the 1980s eruption of Mt. St. Helens, showing the cloud of hot gas and ash approaching, then overwhelming the photographer. I still think about those pix all the time, so I guess volcanic explosion is the one that makes me shudder most.
Riding out a hurricane in a beachfront building, however, would be a close second. Going on for hours with the wind getting stronger and stronger and stronger, and then the water starts coming up …
We hung out in the basement for a couple hours; IE: a couple hours longer than I’d like to be scared out of my mind.