Around here, they alert you to go outside and look at the sky to see if you can see a tornado or other violent weather.
Hah!
All I’m saying is that more times than I can remember, we’ve had the sirens going off, and there are either no tornadoes, or they’re 20 miles away on the other side of the county. I’ve even had them going off around me and it wasn’t even raining where I was.
Personally, I feel like they should try to make it more geographically granular, so that they can set off the sirens and warn your phones in a defined area of their choosing (“they” being the NWS, city emergency management people, etc…) so that they’re not doing exactly what I’ve had happen.
They’re definitely better than they used to be, but still not as good as they should be.
And given the current state of affairs with the NWS, I don’t foresee much improvement in the near future.
Don’t mean to hijack the thread. Carry on.
June 8th, 1966, a massive F5 tornado crashed through the middle of Topeka Kansas, I was eleven years old. Our family home was not damaged, but most of the university was destroyed, the small airport, many homes and buildings blown out. It could have been worse. If the tornado had angled about four blocks further west most ot the downtown, the capitol building, and two hospitals would have been destroyed
Washburn University had a law school and that evening a law student was filling in as a TV anchor. His calm on air demeanor brought him to the attention of CBS and so Bill Kurtis got a boost and became a famous anchor and film journalist.
I used to live right at the mouth of a tidal river, and we’d get serious floods every three or four years. Our home was up on a little hill, so we weren’t directly affected by the deluge, but it did block all roads out, so we, and most of our neighbours, were isolated for a few days while we waited for the waters to recede.
Not much else. Most earthquakes happened far away, and though New Zealand is volcano-rich, not near where I lived.
Northridge Quake. Nothing too scary. A little rockin’ and rollin’
I don’t expect anybody to believe this, but when I was a kid, in a place pretty completely unknown for quakes, I was sitting home alone on a New Year’s Eve. Parents were at a party somewhere. I was upstairs, watching Silver Streak. I swear to god, just as Amrail comes barreling into the terminal, the house starts to quiver a little, then shake a little worse. Went on for a short time, nothing to serious, but sure enough to know it was an earthquake.
I nearly crapped my pants!
Dropped the neighbours’ tree on top of my car.
I am absolutely surprised that so many of you that live in tornado country have seen so few. I’ve lived almost my entire life in northwestern South Dakota or Northeastern Wyoming, and have seen no less than five on-the-ground twisters and many more funnel clouds that never touched down.
I’ve also had several vehicles destroyed by hail and once took a beating (from large hail) helping folks into an evacuation shelter (I was shielding them with an athletic mat, barely any left to cover myself… but I was young and invincible!)
When I read the thread title, I wondered if the Northridge Quake counted.
I lived on Clarington at Palms, and it was a bit more than ‘a little rockin’ and rollin’’. The 10 fell down a couple of exits east of me. Shelves fell over in my apartment. I was working at Lockheed in Ontario at the time, and I called to say I’m not coming in. My supervisor was incredulous. ‘You’re not coming in just because of an earthquake?’ I said, ‘Well, the freeway fell down…’
Tornadoes are a seasonal occurrence in the Midwest, but at least reliably move from a northeasterly direction. We’d huddle in the NE corner of our basement since it was the least likely to have the house collapsed onto us. But the foundation also leaked in that corner, which was unfortunate because we kids were compelled to kneel and say our Hail Marys and Our Fathers until the wind subsided.
In 1960 Hurricane Donna went right over our house. The storm died down to nothing and we realized we were in the eye. I went out during it for a couple of minutes.
Even now, I remember how still it was and how heavy the air felt. We went right inside before the wind picked up again.
Our house and trees were undamaged.
Same. I actually slept through it.
My roommate and I had fortunately gone inland to stay with friends before it hit, because our living room had four feet of seawater in it. It was six months before we could move back into our apartment.
This was a month after Hugo. I was on the phone with my dad at the time (he was in El Cerrito). I remember him saying something like “that probably caused some damage someplace”.
When I visited my parents at Christmas, I was there for a week before I saw any damage (in large part because we had to detour far away from the collapsed freeways and bridges). Charleston had tens of thousands unable to go home and every Scotch pine up and down the coast snapped off 20’ of the ground. Despite the disparity in damage, Loma Prieta completely sucked media attention away from Hugo.
I was in the Sound of Music store in Roseville, MN that was struck by a tornado in 1981. The owner, Dick Schulze, had a “Tornado Blow Out Sale” that was so successful it eventually evolved into Best Buy and Schulze became a multi-billionaire.
There were about 5 of us in the store at the time and we were buried in rubble. It was a harrowing and frightening experience and I’ve always resented how Schulze exploited the disaster to create Best Buy. Schulze wrote in his biography, ““It was the best thing that could happen to us.” Fuck him.
Most of the tornadoes that touch the ground only stay for a few seconds. Even the bigger and meaner ones will tear up an area of a few square miles at best. There are millions of square miles in and adjacent to Tornado Alley. So statistically speaking it’s unlikely that someone in Tornado Alley will be anywhere near one. The big F5 that tore up Joplin could just as easily have torn up seven square miles of nothing, had it been a different day. It just happened that the seven or so square miles it tore up were in a city of 50,000.
I should add that the one time a tornado went right over my head I didn’t see it, since I was, you know, taking shelter. And it was at night.
When what was left of Hurricane Floyd hit New Jersey it dumped 14 inches of rain on the state. There was 12 feet of water surrounding my house. I got my pregnant wife out of a second story window to a boat.
Sorry. San Francisco is just more photogenic.
I’ve been fortunate to have evaded living through any truly serious natural disasters. I have been near/adjacent to some, and they’ve given me a fair amount of respect for how powerful nature can be.
Shortly after graduating college I was working for an engineering/construction firm, and got sent to St. Croix to rebuild the Hess Oil refinery there after Hurricane Hugo. I got there about 5 months after the storm, and the devastation was still evident. The power grid was pretty fragile, the main hospital on the island was still operating out of what looked like M.A.S.H. tents, and the oil storage tanks on the refinery looked like a kaiju had come stomping through. There were almost-300-ft-diameter storage tanks with the roofs gone and creases in the walls down into 1.5” thick steel. As I understand it, Hugo took a last-minute juke such that the refinery was able to off-load all the product onto tankers and get it out of there, but they didn’t have time to pump seawater into the tanks to give them some structural rigidity. The damage was truly impressive.
Same company, working in a facility SW of Chicago amongst the cornfields. Looked out the loading bay doors at a beautiful blue summer sky, turned around to inspect a piece, and the 2 minutes later looked out the same loading doors at a green sky. 
WTF? Skies aren’t supposed to be that color. Tornado siren went off, and we all sheltered for 15 minutes or so. I’m not crazy about atmospheric phenomena that can just drop right out of the sky like that.
My new bride and I bought a house in the western Chicago suburbs in 1995. The following summer we had record-setting rainfall that put 2-3 feet of water in our basement. The good news is that we had bought flood insurance, and our State Farm contact was super-helpful and facilitated mitigation and repairs quickly. Others in our neighborhood were not so fortunate.
Moved to the Cocoa Beach area in the summer of 2004 where we got to experience Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne. We were fine - lost some bits of the cage around the pool - but parts of our community were without power for weeks.
Lived in Miami when Hurricane Irma headed our way. I was in India while my wife was having to deal with everything about the storm. It was the most helpless I’ve ever felt in my life. She bugged out, and when she came back he power was out, and there were some big tree limbs down, but no significant damage at all. Again, people around us got it much worse. Before she left, we talked on the phone and gamed out possible scenarios and I said that the best-case scenario was that we had minimal damage. Second-best case was that the house gets obliterated and we take our insurance money and move somewhere else. It’s the partial damage case that’ll kill you. We knew people that couldn’t live in their homes for a year or more because they got something like a foot-and-a-half of water in their house, the power was out for a week, and so they had mold everywhere. Ugh.
I grew up in SoCal. I was in middle school when 1971 San Fernando earthquake - Wikipedia went off. No damage anywhere near us, but our backyard pool was sloshing something fierce. I rode through any number of more minor quakes before and after.
I was living in Las Vegas when 1990 Upland earthquake - Wikipedia happened. That one downed the line of wooden power poles behind my business, knocking out power to couple blocks for a few days. This was ancient cheapo 1950s infrastructure that had only survived that long because of Vegas’ generally benign weather.
We’d been planning to move the business anyhow to newly rented larger accommodations across town. We did a crash move over the weekend and had rudimentary operations going again 18 hours after the quake. Lotta damned work, but darn handy we had the other location already in hand.
I was living in St. Louis where tornado watches were ~2x/week occurrences (cry wolf much?) over 4 months every year and tornado warnings were ~3x/year events. One time there was a warning in the late afternoon and I went outside to see an especially ominous looking textbook rotating wall cloud go by overhead. I commented to my wife “That thing is about to drop a tornado on somebody.” About 15 miles later this started: 2011 St. Louis tornado - Wikipedia.
Since moving to greater Miami I’ve had a number of minor encounters with tropical cyclones amounting to nothing more than a little extra tree debris on the ground or a rainy windy day. By then my now-late wife was in no condition to weather any significant storm or inconvenience, so we took a very precautionary approach to evacuating to someplace well out of the way early and often whenever a hurricane had a decent chance of hitting our area. In Florida that’s called “taking a hurrication”. Hurriedly-planned hurricane-inspired vacation going to anywhere-but-here. 
So when Hurricane Irma - Wikipedia threatened, we hurricationed with friends back in St. Louis for 10 days. It ended up doing lots of mostly minor damage to our area, but the local electricity was out for 5 days, which cost me a freezer & fridge full of food. One of our neighbors who stayed behind was kind enough to dumpster all that food so we didn’t also come back to a ruined fridge or stenching condo.
The next excitement was Hurricane Dorian - Wikipedia. We hurricationed early and long to the Pensacola area. A couple days after we got settled in Pensacola as Dorian was approaching SoFL it was totally boresighted on my zipcode; we’d have been hit, and hit hard. Instead it stalled over Freeport for 2 days, substantially wiping the island clean. Mind-boggling levels of devastation. Then it headed up towards the Carolinas, never much messing with SoFL beyond sustained heavy rain. The worst our area got was tree damage. IIRC the local power never went out or did so only briefly.
But had Dorian kept coming another 90 miles west the devastation Freeport experienced would have been dropped on my town. Yikes!
We’ve not had a material threat to Greater Miami since then, so 6 years. Where I’m living now there’s no need to evacuate for safety’s sake, the power ought to be a bunch more reliable, and I’m hale and hearty enough to deal with any level of inconvenience.
But if the area is hit, the absence of power, debris-choked roads, no gasoline, etc., would make living through the aftermath a PITA for a week or two until most of normalcy is restored. I’ll probably hurrication anyhow; why bother planning to sit through the worst of the clean-up when there’s no need to? Being retired has its advantages. The Emergency Management folks’ job is easiest when they don’t have a captive population to tend to also.
The key to a successful stress- and traffic-free hurrication is to leave 2 days before the public finally notices a hurricane is coming. So about 5 days before it’s predicted to be near your area.
Like LSLGuy, I was a young teenager living in Southern California, the San Gabriel Valley to be exact, when the 1971 Sylmar quake hit. It was pretty strong where we lived and I remember my mom panicking and screaming for my dad. I was a bit phobic about quakes for a few years after that.
Mr. brown and I lived in Ventura during the 1994 Northridge quake. It was even bigger than the Sylmar one, and we felt it pretty strongly. We and our three pugs ran out into the backyard and we saw the telephone poles swaying violently and the transformers arcing electricity, not to mention the ground rippling like swells on the ocean. The pugs were unaware that there was anything amiss; they merely thought we were all running into the backyard for an early morning play session. I watched them all swaying in unison as the residual shock waves moved the ground.
Public service announcements on the radio told everybody to stay home and off the streets unless there was a dire emergency, main phone lines were down, and we were without electricity for a couple of days. I stayed home from work at my law firm that day and learned afterwards that there was a big discussion among the partners on whether to dock us admins a day’s pay for not coming in.