The worst one was an ice storm back in 2002. Power was out for a week during the winter. We also had no water since we are on a well and the pump needs electricity to work. We had a gas fireplace that saved our bacon and kept the living room tolerably warm until the power came back on.
We’ve lost a lot of trees to ice storms here over the years, including a Leyland cypress that fell and popped one of the bedroom windows out of its frame in the middle of the night. The window wasn’t broken, so once my husband had chain-sawed the tip of the cypress off and pulled it out of the room, we were able to pop it back in place.
My parents’ house was hit by a tornado when I was in college. It flattened the blue spruce next to the garage, lifted the garage doors up and blew them in, and blew in all the windows in the front of the house. My mom was in the front bedroom taking a nap at the time and was showered with broken glass. Fortunately she wasn’t hurt but getting out of the room was a bit tricky. The tornado left a trail through the neighborhood, ripping the second stories off two houses down the hill and then it went into the park, where you could see exactly where it hit - everything in its path was flat while the trees and grass on either side were untouched.
The college town I was in is extremely flat, and I lived on campus on the 10th/top floor of a dorm. We saw a tornado heading our way from a mile or two off just a few weeks before the one that hit the house - fortunately it changed course and then dissipated. That was a bad tornado year.
I’ve also experienced 3 earthquakes - 2 in Ohio, and one here in NC that had its epicenter in VA. Just little bitty things, but strange nonetheless.
We’ve also had our share of power outages due to hurricanes and tropical storms - fortunately we’re not in a flood zone.
In the Midwest, so out of range of serious issues from hurricanes and earthquakes (though if the New Madrid fault ever goes, we’ll probably feel it here).
I’ve experienced a lot of heavy snowstorms, but nearly always knew about them well in advance, and was prepared.
We’ve had some ice storms, but only one which knocked the power out (and it was out for two days).
A number of torrential rainfalls, but not ever enough that our street was flooded (though we’ve had a few instances where we had a lot of water in the basement).
A fair number of tornadoes that have come within a couple of miles of us, but the only one that ever really got close passed about 200 yards south of us last July. It was only an EF0, and I was out of state, at a funeral in northern Wisconsin, when it happened.
Another member of the Loma Prieta quake club. I was 18. I had just punched the clock at my warehouse job in Newark when the quake struck. I rode it out under a doorway with a pregnant woman.
I lived in northern San Jose, right on the Milpitas border. What was usually a 20 minute drive to get home was an hour and a half that night, because electricity was out all over the place. Not in my neightborhood, though. My girlfriend worked in a Fotomat booth down the street from my house, and she was still there when I checked on her. As I recall, her asshole boss told her since her booth had power, there was no reason to close down. Needless to say, she had no more customers that night.
We had family friends who lived in Santa Cruz at the time. As soon as I got home I called them, and their high-school-aged daughter answered. She was completely freaked out, screaming about how their aquarium had fallen over. Then she said she had to go because her parents weren’t home yet and she didn’t know where they were. (They turned up later, and were fine.)
What was weird about that was phone service to Santa Cruz was out for days or weeks, I don’t remember how long. My family wasn’t able to get a hold of our friends again for some time. Somehow I got a lucky call in just a couple of hours after the quake.
I also experienced the Loma Prieta quake, although we were far enough from the epicenter to suffer no damage.
If wildfires started by our incompetent power company count, the Tubbs Fire hit my hometown hard enough that I was evacuated for several days. I actually live in Santa Rosa, the city hit hardest by the fire. Many homes and various landmarks were burned.
The fire started near Tubbs Lane in the rural northern part of Calistoga, in Napa County. It destroyed more than 5,643 structures,[1][3][13] half of which were homes in Santa Rosa.[14] Santa Rosa’s economic loss from the Tubbs Fire was estimated at $1.2 billion (2017 USD), with five percent of the city’s housing stock destroyed.[4] The Tubbs Fire also incurred an additional $100 million in fire suppression costs.[5]
Although exacerbated by poor politics and planning, I think the Texas Deep Freeze would count as a natural disaster. At our house, the temps were below freezing for 5 days, which is almost unheard of in this region. Even running at max, our (electric) furnace could only maintain 55 degrees or so.
We’re preppers, so we came through with only minor problems. I think the triple whammy of losing electricity, water, and then natural gas overwhelmed almost everyone else. Two of our friends had whole-house generators which failed when the gas ran out, leaving them with no source of heat. This region is mostly un-walkable surburbia, so with iced over streets and no tire chains, few could get out and forage for water or some sort of heat. We checked on our two elderly neighbors and they were doing fine.
Once the streets were more usable, I drove around some just to see what happened. Apparently, a lot of those with lifted trucks discovered their Bro-Dozers aren’t ideal for ice. It seemed like every ditch had one of two of these machines in it.
When this happened, my wife was recovering from the flu, and I was dealing a previous injury and walking with a cane. Thankfully we didn’t need to evacuate or do much strenuous labor. Looking through my journal, I’d noted on several days the malaise and depressing feelings of watching the temperatures stay below freezing for such a long time. The feeling of being trapped in my house began to surface after a week. These were elements of natural disasters I hadn’t thought about. The mental problems from these could be almost as bad as the deprivation. I wonder if some have actual PTSD from these experiences. It seems likely.
Oklahoma. The weather is definitely not a selling point.
Also very much this. They tend to be very localized events, and the big monster tornadoes that destroy literally everything are so rare.
Tornadoes are scary, but you generally have plenty of warning (especially for the big ones). I will choose tornadoes every day over massive earthquakes, hurricanes or tsunamis - those cause so much more damage over a larger area.
I’ve spent my entire life in Kansas, and have seen exactly one tornado. It happened when I was seven, coming home from school. Twister touched down about 200 yards from us in a field, which we thought was very cool. Until we got home and Mom was screaming at us to get into the storm cellar.
But several years later a tornado ripped through the area about two miles from my parents house, destroying the homes of two neighbors. Two of the kids stayed with us for several days until their folks found a new place to live.
Otherwise, a couple of ice storms were the worst…both knocked out power for 5-6 days. Major inconvenience, but certainly not life-threatening.
The Good Friday earthquake in Alaska in 1964. At 9.2, it was the most powerful recorded earthquake in North American history and the second most powerful recorded globally. With a duration of nearly five minutes, it wreaked considerable havoc and generated tsunamis up to 200 feet high and as far away as northern California. Our home survived (slab on grade, single story) even though we were only a few blocks from the fault line. I was 16 at the time.
Nothing much else, but that was quite enough, thanks.
Hurricane Hugo 1989. The eye passed over the place where I was staying. Unfortunately, though, Hugo made landfall and moved inland under cover of darkness, so I wasn’t able to go outside and see blue skies in the middle of a major storm.
Also, this wasn’t a particularly big ‘disaster,’ but I was in Hilo during the 2006 Hawaii earthquake.. Eerie thing seeing the walls of your hotel gently swaying from side to side. However. . . it was an otherwise slow news day and cable news outlets were going wall to wall with coverage, despite the relatively minor damage across the islands.
Two derechos almost exactly ten years apart. I was in some of the hardest hit areas for both. Lost power for nearly a week both times in some of the hottest and most humid weather I can remember. That 98 MPH wind gust in the 2022 event was recorded just a few miles from where I live.
I still get jittery when severe weather is predicted.
(The sum total of my knowledge is Oklahoma! for which I played high school pit orchestra. Every time I hear your state’s name I have to actively resist singing the whole song.)
We were building our house in 2020 when the Bridger Foothills fire blew up–ran 6 miles in about 3 hours, one group of firefighters had to deploy their shelters (and survived). Burned our whole property but not the house because there was bare dirt all around it because of excavation. We lost a lot of vegetation and the porta-john. I was a kid in the mid-70s for a major Maine ice storm–lost power for 5 days. Luckily we had a good wood stove!
On May 18th, 1980, I was a kid in eastern Washington State. Playing at a friend’s house, friend’s mom told me that my mom had called and I had to run home right away. Halfway home, it started raining sand.
I don’t recall a lot of the details of the cleanup, but I gather it was challenging. How do you collect and dispose of an inch-thick layer of finely powdered rock all over the place?
We were in Hoboken NJ during Hurricane Sandy. The interesting thing about the geography of Hoboken is that it’s mostly landfill at or below sea level along the Hudson River, except for the middle where Stephens College rises up on a sort of bluff. So for about a day most of the city was under 1-5 feet of water.
I would say it was one of the few “apocalyptic” level natural disasters I’ve had to deal with. Like where you see rubble everywhere, boats deposited hundreds of yards inland, public transportation knocked out, National Guard trucks and whatnot.
One interesting phenomenon was crowds of people standing around a octopus of power strips daisy changed to portable generators so the could charge their phones. With no power or internet, cell phones were really the only way to get information for about a week.
There was a massive windstorm last year south of Lake Erie which was as bad as any hurricanes I experienced in Florida, and arguably worse; had no power for 5 days.
I’ve been through a bunch of tropical storms, and one full-fledged hurricane (Alicia) when I grew up in Houston as a kid. Mostly those weren’t terribly destructive; just cartoonish amounts of rain. Our house never flooded, but part of our backyard and our street had flooded several times.
Since I’ve been an adult, it’s still mostly been flooding; the “Great Southeast Texas Flood of 1994” was one of the more memorable ones- I was in college, and it had been raining, but it kicked up like crazy while we were eating one night, and we ended up being lucky that we made it back to campus, because there was a lot of flooding- enough that the pressure on the storm sewers had pushed the manhole covers off and water was gushing up out of them.
Once I moved to Dallas, we’ve had an ice storm that put our power out for a day or so, a really violent thunderstorm that required a new roof, (we caught that hail on the video), another one that required another new roof, a tornado that came within a mile or so of us (it was aimed at us, but curved northward), and the 2021 freeze. With the exception of the thunderstorms, they didn’t do us any damage, and we were lucky enough in 2021 to not lose power at all. Luck of the draw, I suppose, because we don’t live close to anything important.
The trick is really just to be prepared. After the ice storm in 2013, I bought a bunch of stuff to make it easier- camping stoves, battery powered lanterns, etc… and we started keeping some water on hand, and other stuff like that.
I’ve become somewhat more discerning about severe weather alerts; I don’t usually get overly concerned if the tornado sirens go off; they’re not granular enough to actually be useful, except maybe if you’re not aware of the weather at all. At best, they alert you to look on the TV or phone as to where the tornadoes actually are (most of the time they’re 20 miles away).
