The eye passed over my house..we had clear weather for 5-10 minutes. I remember going outside (which you should NEVER do)..chatting with my neighbors, picking up some debris.. and then going back inside for the second half when the wind started to pick up.
I also went through Katrina - the Florida version. Not the same storm at all. One of my friends had his condo flooded out though, and he ended up staying with me for a while. So I housed a Katrina refugee.
(no..I didn’t claim the tax break).
I’ve been in many quakes, but none of historic proportions.
A year or two ago there was a moderate quake (a 5 or 6, I can’t remember) in central Java that caused strong shaking here in Jakarta. Aside from making our Javanese gamelan gongs ring out (spooky but cool), it caused mesmerizing wave patterns in the swimming pool that lasted for at least 10 minutes after the shaking ended.
I’m pretty sure it was the ice storm in 2008. I know the blizard of 78 was bad, but I don’t think it did nearly as much damage as the worst ice storm in state history. When it hit KY a few days later, it became their biggest natural disaster in their state history, period.
I was pretty close (Cahuenga Pass), but decided not to crawl under the bed, as it was too dirty.
I did have the presence of mind to turn on the tape recorder and scan the few radio stations that were on the air. I still have that tape, complete with commentary, “no serious damage has been reported…” Disk jockeys playing (when the needle would stay in the groove) “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” “I’m all shook up,” and “Let it Be.”
In recent times, I’ve personally experienced nothing worse than a few big thunderstorms with heavy downpours and the odd blocked drain. I was in Sydney during the 1999 hail storm, but its path was quite narrow. Where I live, a couple of kilometres away from the storm’s track, we didn’t even get any rain, let alone hail.
I also remember the last major earthquake to affect Sydney, back in 1973. It occurred early in the morning, and my parents got us all out of the house into the garden. I remember how chilly it was standing there in my pyjamas.
The March 11th earthquake that hit Japan. While Tokyo didn’t have anything even close to the destruction that hit northeastern Japan, this was the first earthquake I’ve experienced where we literally couldn’t stand up or walk during the shaking. I joined the hordes of people lucky enough to be able to walk home; it took over an hour and I had heels on that day, but that was nothing compared to people who walked upwards of 8 hours.
The next several days were surreal as well. Constant aftershocks, non-stop news coverage, no food in the shops, and the crash course in what happens when a nuclear power plant loses back-up cooling capability.
Loma Prieta–I was in my truck about 3 blocks from where I’m sitting right now. I was waiting at a light and my 4Runner started shuddering and shaking…I thought I was having some kind of major engine trouble. Then the utility poles started swaying, and I was strangely relieved that it was “just” an earthquake. Where I was sitting I was in no danger whatsoever, so I tried to enjoy the ride.
The DC area doesn’t really have many natural disasters that I can think of. Just the ones that were memorable:
-Snowpocalypse 2010. Digging out from that really sucked.
-The Mid-Atlantic flooding of June 2006. You know how when it downpours, it’s like sheets of water that seem too thick to be real, but you know it can only keep up for maybe 30 minutes at most? Well, it started raining like that and then it just kept going for two days straight, without end. There was just So. Much. Water. Huge roads were totally shut down due to flooding and 16 people died. Our rich county was one of the hardest hit and got federal disaster aid to clean up.
-While recognizing that hurricanes hit here on a scale orders of magnitude less than what people farther south get, Hurricane Isabel did some pretty memorable damage by our standards. We used up 3 snow days in September that year.
I was in Baton Rouge during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Katrina was relatively uneventful in Baton Rouge. It was sure windy, and a little scary. My apartment was on the 3rd floor of our building, which made us feel really vulnerable to the winds. Lots of creaking that night. Certainly no sleep! The worst part though, was the fallout afterwards - cell phones not working for days, the increase in traffic and PEOPLE in the city, and a general sense of complete weirdness and panic, since most of the good folks of BR are either from New Orleans or have close family and friends there. Baton Rouge is not traffic-friendly, and the city has well outgrown its infrastructure. There were so many people staying with friends and family in the city, the grocery stores were tapped out of things like bread and milk. People were panicking that they couldn’t get in touch with relatives who stayed in NO. My roommate’s mother had stayed in NO with her prized Doberman Pinschers because she couldn’t find a place that would put her up and board the Pinschers too. Since cell phones were out, no one could get in touch with anyone. It was madness. One of my friends was in the Marine Corps and went with a boat to help rescue people in NO. He was a tough kid, but he came back from that experience a very somber man.
Rita was actually quite a bit worse for BR. There was a lot more rain and some serious flooding. We had the obligatory “hurricane party,” of course. My neighbors were two cheerleaders for the NO Saints, and they and my friends all got completely smashed that night. Sure enough, as usually happened during heavy rain, our parking lot started flooding. But it was REALLY flooding, and peoples cars were getting ruined. So on one of our very treacherous and stupid, but fun, exploratory walks around the apartment complex, we spotted a guy with a broom who was sweeping the leaves from the drainage grates (there were several drains in the very center of the lanes of the parking lot, and they’d been covered with leaves because of the wind blowing the leaves and branches down, of course). What a brilliant idea! We all pitched in - myself, the Saints cheerleaders, and several of our compadres, and we miraculously and systematically drained the parking lot of each area of the entire apartment complex! I still remember what extraordinary fun it was to finally get enough leaves out of the way to create some serious suckage on the other side of that drain, then watching it swirl swirl swirl like some jet-powered toilet flush. And the entire parking lot would then drain in just a couple of minutes. Ahhh, Rita.
Tornadoes on several occasions: Palm Sunday 1965; April 3rd 1974; two other smaller occurrences.
The Blizzard of 1978, in northern Indiana.
Since moving south, I’ve weathered about a half dozen tropical storms and a glancing blow from one hurricane.
I’ve been through two forest fires, as a hose jockey, big enough to warrant regional news coverage.
Since coming to Maryland this February, nothing. But the year’s still young.
ETA: None of them have been really big as far as personal experience. Probably the blizzard was the worst as far as messing things up and shutting us in, but we had a good time anyway.
I had a truck run through my house, and that was as bad as a house fire, but it’s also not a natural disaster. Doesn’t count, I guess.
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced any really massive natural disasters. Floods and snowstorms aplenty. I remember one thunderstorm in Chicago where the wind knocked down trees and telephone poles.
Three tornadoes, one as a kid, one as a teenager and one as an adult. Two of them were on the ground less than 400 feet from me, and the third wasn’t much further away.
Hurricane Charley and Frances knocked out our power for two weeks, and literally destroyed the above-ground pool at the house we were renting (knocked a 40-foot pine down which chopped it in half). Fortunately, we’d drained the pool a week earlier because the pump failed.
Another SF quake of '89 “survivor” here. I use the scare quotes because, unlike the most seriously affected, I got off easy. I was living in San Bruno at the time, and there was no damage to my apartment other than a couple of items falling off shelves. The slight flooding that my family’s house in Chicago would get every so often during a heavy rainstorm was more of a problem.
