I was living in California during the Northridge earthquake…that certainly scared the bejesus out of me and it was a horrible few days afterwards with aftershocks, lack of power and water, etc.
Which natural disaster(s) have you experienced?
I was in a tornado when I was a kid. OK, I wasn’t in it. But it turned some houses into matchsticks just a few blocks away.
Or there was the ice storm that caused us to lose power for a few days and kept us out of school for two weeks.
I survived Hurricane Floyd in 1999, but I didn’t even get a damn T-shirt for it.
Back in the mid-80s I had a beachfront apartment in Long Beach, Long Island. When hurricane Gloria hit, I was the only one in my building who didn’t evacuate (I didn’t want to leave my cats alone). My building was constructed of cinder blocks covered with bricks . . . and it still shook from the wind. I don’t ever want to experience that again.
When Hurricane Gloria hit, I went into work. I was managing a movie theatre at the time, and it was payday. A lot of my employees braved the hurricane to get their paychecks!
Some hurricane or tropical storm that I can’t recall. It was probably 2002 or 2003. We don’t get hit with much here in the center of the state, but that one particularly sucked because we were without power for about three days and it was hotter than the hinges of hell.
Highlights: During the storm, I was looking out the window and saw our mailbox fly away.
We were remodeling the kitchen at the time, so we had no countertops and no way to cook anything except the microwave, which didn’t work because the power was out.
We were also renovating the bathroom. We spent the night in there when the storm came…one child in the tub, one child on the floor (with a piece of cardboard over the hole where the toilet used to be) and me next to that kid with my legs sticking out in the hall. I inhaled drywall dust all night.
I’ve lived in Florida all my life, and that’s my worst hurricane story.
By comparison, I haven’t experienced anything really awful.
- A number of big snowstorms
- Heavy rains and flooding, but nothing beyond some water in the basement for us
- Extremely hot and cold weather (including the 1996 heat wave in Chicago which killed several hundred people)
Have had to head to the basement for any number of tornado warnings, but I’ve never had a tornado come closer than a few miles from the house.
DMark, Me too. I lived in Sylmar when the quake happened. The freeways were a mess for months.
Then I moved to NC just in time for the aftermath of hurricane Fran!
I don’t get no respect… 
Oh hey, you’re me, down to that heat wave. The apartment I was living in at the time had the (wall-built-in) AC unit die due to overuse, and fortunately my husband managed to convince the complex’s maintenance group to pull a unit out an unrented apartment and swap it out for our broken one.
I was in a building that the eye of Hurricane Hugo passed over.
My basement apartment flooded due to Hurricane Isabel.
I also lived through Snowpocalypse, though I know know which was worse.
Great Ice Storm of 1998?
I was living in San Francisco during the 1989 earthquake - I know that it wasn’t the biggest quake the area has ever had, but it was kinda funny in the weeks thereafter, when people discovered that I was from South Africa and said something to the effect of “aren’t you afraid of all the violence, living there?”
“Dude, the earth just moved!!!”
I was in Seattle during the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, magnitude 6.8. Our building had quite a lot of shaking, and the ground turned very rubbery and elastic for the duration, but there was no serious damage.
No. Where was that?
This was in Rochester, NY, in 1977 I think. They got a much worse one in, IIRC, 1992, but I wasn’t living there at the time.
Hurricane Charley passed right over me. In the eye and everything. Fortunately, I wasn’t in Fort Myers area but in Orlando where it was “only” a category 2. It still almost tore my roof completely off (it did create some minor holes where you could see light through.)
Fortunately, living in Britain, we don’t really do natural disasters. The worst I can think of were some rather large forest fires in the summer of 1976. I was only a kid, and the fires were miles away (although the smoke was everywhere), and no-one got hurt. I accept that this isn’t a great anecdote.
Northridge quake for me, too. Although our house sustained no damage, that was the biggest quake I’ve ever lived through.
Some competitors might be some of the really big wildfires of the 2000’s. I think it was 2003 when the fires caused ash to rain down over my area like heavy snow. The stench was absolutely incredible.
Ontario, Quebec, parts of upstate NY.