Tornadoes, rock-slides, volcanoes, wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, thunderstorms, blizzard, tsunamis… oh my!
Which of these natural disasters is most frightening to you?
For me it’s 100% earthquakes. You have no warning and no way to hide from them, and they affect such a large area… they are just horrible.
Earhquakes leave me completely unfazed. Tornadoes on the other hand, deeply disturb me.
Earthquakes. They’re unpredictable and there’s not much you can do if caught in one.
Oh, I answered the poll for “most horrible natural disaster” - I put tsunami, just because it seems so destructive, and you get so little warning. Having a huge wall of water come and wash away your entire village just seems worse than anything else on the list. I am not really personally afraid of them, though, living in central Ohio as I do. 
If I’d answered based on personal fear level, I’d have to go with tornadoes.
I said “tornado” because that’s the one I’m most likely to experience. (Alright, I’ve also been in blizzards, but tornadoes are much more likely to suck my house off the foundation and leave me shivering and soaked in my skivvies - with blizzards, just stay inside you’ll most likely be OK)
Really, though, the natural disaster that is most frighting to me would be whatever one I would, hypothetically, be experiencing. As I live on the Great Plains, rockslides and tsunamis are pretty unlikely in my area so they aren’t something I personally fear.
For all time “OMG! OMFG! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” fear it would have to be a super-eruption of Yellowstone, which would be filed under “volcano” the same way the recent Tuscaloosa Tornado would be filed under “rain”, only more so. But that’s the only volcano-like thing I fear would affect me here.
The top two vote getters were the ones I vacillated between.
I went with wildfires. The only one I have experience with, but also, consider the following (these are just things I’ve been told - I could be misinformed, so if you live in a fire zone get proper advice etc):
Here (Australia), bush fires spread fast enough that you generally can’t outrun them in a car. Apparently the best thing to do is therefore drive straight at the fire front and hope that you get out the other side fast enough - you spend less time in the fire that way so you’ll probably be okay, but if it overtakes you as you flee, you’re probably screwed.
The big fires we had in Victoria a couple of years ago were intense enough that the above technique didn’t work - I believe quite a few people died trying to drive through the fire front.
Anyway for some reason the predictability of fires is kind of what gets me about them, in a way. I remember the day of the fires a couple of years ago… I was in Melbourne at the time, so we’re not going to be affected directly, but walking outside and feeling 47 degree dry air and a high wind, I remember thinking ‘oh shit, someone in the country is going to get screwed by this.’ Then 11pm that night I was driving out to my mum’s place to help defend. Everything was fine in the end, but walking around the property with a torch and a wet Hessian sack at four in the morning looking for spot fires, with the torch beam constantly filled with falling ash and orange-illuminated plumes of smoke at various points on the horizon was such a surreal and frightening experience that it’s left a bit of a mark. That said, presumably any natural disaster is like this in its own way, so my vote is definitely an emotionally motivated one. 
The natural disaster that scares me the most is the one I am experiencing at the moment.
I live in tornado and blizzard territory and have had nightmares about both of them. Tornados are scarier because they are so freaky. I have a better idea of what to do if I were stuck outside in a blizzard.
I’ve personally seen over a dozen tornadoes, but those Japanese Tsunami videos put them in the shade.
Poisoned lava tornado. Terrifies me
I went with other. The worst natural disaster I can think of would be an asteroid or comet strike on the earth. The other disasters are bad, but big rocks falling from the sky have the capacity to sterilize the earth. The other disasters on the list, while severe for the people effected, are very localized.
Wildfires. Don’t like the idea of being turned to living charcoal. Seen hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, blizzards, etc. Usually, if your paying attention to events or surroundings, you have some warning. But wildfires along coastal California were anytime, anywhere. The Los Pilitas fire in 1985 is one that sticks in my mind: partially carbonized leaves were raining down from the darken sky from fires at least 10 miles away (the closest the fire got to the house). An uncomfortable metaphor for a nuclear winter.
The reason I picked earthquakes over tornadoes is that tornadoes are much more localized. They hit this neighborhood but leave the other untouched. Earthquakes affect a huge geographical area.
According to Wkipedia, the highest death toll for a tornado is 1,300. For an earthquake it’s 830,000. That’s quite a difference!
I voted earthquakes. I live and grew up in the midwest so tornadoes are more common, but there is nearly always advanced warning.
I grew up and live in California, where we rarely see tornadoes, and I voted for them. The ‘advanced warning’ bit is part of what makes them so terrifying. You can see one coming, but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. And when it comes down your street, it might leave houses on one side completely untouched, and the ones on the other side reduced to matchsticks. You just have to hope your house is on the right side.
I’d rather take my chances that the ground will suddenly open up and swallow me whole, thank you.
Interesting. I guess the devil you don’t know is scarier than the devil you do know.
This.
Australia is not prone to many of the natural disasters that beset many other parts of the world. We do get cyclones in the tropical north, but they at least give some warning of their approach, so people have an opportunity to batten down the hatches so to speak.
But fires here are horrific, and as Dinaroozie mentioned, the ones we had in Victoria a couple of years ago were particularly frightening. After many years of drought and a stinking hot summer, the last thing anybody wanted was a ferocious north wind to set off a) electrical storms and b) fucking pyromaniacs. 
I think the worst part about earthquakes is that the most solid and reassuring thing you know, the ground, is suddenly turned into a bouncy castle, and everything you thought you knew is turned upside down. Somewhat literally, come to think of it.
Having said that, fires scare me the most, especially now I live in Australia where they’re common.
Good point. The dino’s would agree with you…if they were here…
volcanoes (also the most avoidable.)