Black Saturday Bushfires, Feb 7 2009.
I was at work and all afternoon we watched the sky turn dark. It was pitch black by 6pm, three hours before sunset. Then it started to rain which knocked all the ash out of the sky and the light returned in time for sunset… surreal.
I was never in danger - the fires were nearly 10 miles away - but we could see the flames from work and that’s never a comfortable feeling. 173 people died across the state that day and the losses in other areas were far greater than ours, but 11 local people died and the tiny local town of Callignee was all but destroyed (of the 61 houses in that town, 57 were lost).
Several hurricanes. The first one that I really remember is Carla. The one that I suffered the most loss from was Ike.
I was home alone during Hurricane Gloria. I was 12, and scared, but it wasn’t too bad.
Joe
Lots and lots of hurricanes, but maybe I got used to them because they just never scared me that much. I was lucky enough to be vising San Francisco in 1989 when the earthquake struck and 22 years later I am still scared by that experience. It was horrifying!
I was at Travis AFB California (about an hour north of SF) during the Bay Area Earthquake of 89 - felt that rolling feeling (it didn’t feel like a shake, it felt like you were on a giant wave) - had the plans stayed the same, we would have been on the Bay Bridge when that part fell.
Was also at Keesler AFB earlier that year during a tropical depression - I do not ever want to be in that area during an actual hurricane <shudder>.
The IceStorms in Ky a few years back - while bad, etc - pale in comparison to those other events.
All earthquakes:
1987 - Whittier Narrows in California (during high school class in the San Gabriel Valley)
1989 - Loma Prieta in California (after freshman college class in Berkeley)
2011 - Tohoku Coast in Japan (during a visit to Tokyo DisneySea outside Tokyo)
Now that sounds interesting - what’s the background on the fact you were alone? Parent(s)/guardian(s) caught out traveling and couldn’t get home before the storm started? Or perhaps the people taking care of you were emergency workers and had to be out in the storm?
Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in Fort Pierce Florida, and an ice storm in 1998 in NW Indiana knocked out everyone’s power for several days are my personal worsts.
I was in Canberra during the 2003 bushfires.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Canberra_bushfires
I remember the same phenomena of the sky being pitch black well before sundown. I also remember the sky turning a bizarre pale green colour earlier that morning before it turned yellow, orange, then red, and finally black.
Thankfully only four people died in that fire.
/It’s a strange thing to be peering from your position on the roof (as you’re watering it with a hose that has no water pressure because everyone else in the city is doing the same thing) and wondering which human construction it is that you’re seeing burning from a few miles away in the sheer blackness.
It took me 14 months to rebuild my house after Katrina. Fortunately I was relatively comfortable during that time. But the few few months were surprisingly tough.
My grandma managed the school cafeteria in our little community halfway between Houston & Galveston; she was also head of the local Red Cross. As Carla approached, the school was opened for refugees–people living closer to The Gulf or in trailers. My Mom took us to stay there, although our house was pretty safe; it was less scary for all of us & actually rather fun. After the initial storm clean up, we took a drive down to Kemah & Seabrook; I learned what Storm Surge can do.
I’ve seen a bunch of Tropical Weather since then but have been lucky. Living just North of downtown, we lost power for less than a day after Ike; many people were out of luck for weeks & there was some real damage, even in town. Flooding from Tropical Storm Allison probably caused more damage to Houston proper but I was able to watch it on TV; “the Heights is like an island.”
An album of Houston area memories! (Lately, we’ve been hoping for just a little system from the Gulf to break this dreadful drought.)
good plan. No part of Keesler escaped flooding during Katrina. The entire base was covered. Most of the water wasn’t deep, but I am told looking out the window and seeing nothing but water everywhere…
It’s really not interesting. Parents had very early jobs, and went to them before school got cancelled, or something like that.
Joe
Hurricane Andrew Went right over top of us. Our home was allright, but we lost just about all the landscaping and the homes to either side were pretty badly damaged.
Hurricanes:
Agnes (1972) - VA suburbs of DC
Belle (1976) - Hartford, CT
Hugo (1989) - Columbia, SC
Isabel (2003) - Southern MD
Assorted snowstorms and ice storms, including last year’s DC Snowmageddon/Snowpocalypse/whatever.
I had pretty much blondebear’s experience during Loma Prieta, except I was standing outside in an empty field. Very strange watching the ground ripple. It felt like I was surfing, only on dry land, of course. I was about 20 miles from the epicenter as the crow flies. No real damage, which was a great blessing.
Hurricane Ike was miserable, but mainly for the extended power outage afterwards. I realize it could have been a lot worse—we were unflooded and our home was undamaged.
Those have been my two biggies. I got to Houston just too late for Allison, but I got to hear all of the crazy flooding stories.
Whatever hurricane it was that hit New England circa '88 or '89.
I was working nights in a warehouse and half the crew didn’t make it in because of flooding. A half-hour after we got there, the power went out across most of the area. We ended up loading one truck by flashlight, and then sitting around playing cards by spot-light hooked to a car battery for four hours before they sent everybody home.
And then it was an adventure. All the roads that I took to get there had flooded over. I had to weave my way through a thousand back roads to get 5 miles away … where the power was out as well. But my buddy lived downtown and he still had power, so I went to his house at 3 in the morning to drink beer.
Not exactly Red Cross material, but then New England doesn’t get a lot of hurricanes.
2004 Charlie, Frances, Jeanne. My sister who lives a mile away lost her home. We were lucky and only lost our screened in patio that collapsed into the pool and most of the roof shingles.
I will never forget walking outside to see the damage the morning after Charlie and the shock over viewing what looked like a war zone. Fortunately few were hurt or killed and property can be replaced.
I remember Gloria in NY in the 80s and I walked to the deli in what turned out to be the worst of it. During Charlie, we huddled in the walk in closet in terror.
There was a massive blizzard in Pittsburgh in 1978 - we lost power and had to move in with relatives for several days.
The “Election Day” flood of 1985.
Hurricane Isabel in the DC area - we slept in the basement with our newborn twins.
I was serving in the Navy in Sicily when this freak cyclone occurred. Some have called it the Mediterranean hurricane. We had to launch a SAR mission to try to find a lost Greek freighter - the plane found nothing but debris. There was considerable damage on base, including to planes that were blown against each other.
I’ve been through so many hurricanes, I’ve lost count.
The scariest natural disaster I’ve experienced was a flash flood on the Blanco river in Texas. This is a small, shallow river in a hilly, rocky, area. We were in a private, family-run campground with about 25-30 people and 9-10 tents in our group. It was occasionally, lightly raining at our site, so several in our camping group decided to drive to Austin for the night to hit 6th street.
That afternoon, the owner of the campground came around to tell us to move away from the river bank as there could be a flood later since there was heavy rain upstream. So, we moved all the cars and dragged a few of the emptier tents to the top of the hill. Other campers moved coolers, BBQ smokers, etc., up the hill. Just generally moving stuff up. The day was still pretty nice- light rain, gray skies, but not really unpleasant.
A while later, the campground owner came around again and said “Grab what you value most and get the hell out. There is a wall of water coming.”
I went to pick up some golf clubs near the waters edge and while I was shouldering them, the water came up to meet my feet. As I walked up the hill, the water came up along the two lower elevation roadways and turned the grassy space between them into an island, basically chasing me up the hill. My 9 pound Italian Greyhound dog became stuck on this island and I was calling him to me, but he was reluctant to get in the water. He finally went for it and was fished out by another camper as he began to float downstream. Yay!
The water quickly rose washed away everything in the area where we had all been camping. The water topped the cement picnic tables. We watched the remaining tents fold over and wash away.
As night fell, we stayed up on the hill and actually had a pretty good night since we had all the coolers and the big smoker full of meat and enough cars and tents to shelter everyone. But it was stressful because we couldn’t really see well and did not know how high the water could get, so has scoped out a walking path to higher ground.
And still the weather was OK where we were. I’d guesstimate the water rose about 15-20 feet over the course of a couple of hours.
The water levels returned to near normal in about 24 hours. When the trip-to-Austin folks returned, at least one car had spent a hairy scary night and day on a high point between low water crossings. A couple of the tents washed away and those folks spent some time scouting around downstream looking for their stuff and finding only shredded nylon and miscellanea snagged on the sides of the river.