Hurricane Wilma was the one with the most wide spread damage. Some insanely high percentage of traffic lights were gone, and those are specialty items that you can’t just buy at your local hardware store. It took a while before we even had one working traffic light at most intersections. Widespread power outages - I was fortunate to get power back after 3 days. I know people that took weeks. The eye passed directly over my house - I was outside chatting with my neighbor, moving some debris into garages while getting ready for the second half of the storm.
I lost a fence to Hurricane Irma. Luckily I only lost power for 30 minutes.
Katrina, while still a tropical storm, came over my house too. A friend’s condo roof collapsed. I ended up letting him stay at my house for a while, so I technically housed a Katrina refugee.
I guess I should quantify my ‘one tornado sighting’. That was the only funnel I’ve seen on the ground. I’ve seen several rotational actions in the air, but none of them actually touched the ground.
Having said that, the darkest cloud I have ever seen was a tornado wreaking havoc on Hesston, Kansas, on March 13, 1990, about 7 miles from me as I was driving home from work. That funnel was on the ground for about 80 miles.
Holy crap! That’s the stuff of my nightmares. And seeing that while driving? What did you do?
I wanted to add I did live in New Jersey at the time of Hurricane Sandy. We weren’t on the coast and our apartment was kind of in a ditch so we missed the worst of the winds, but about a block away there were a lot of trees on roofs.
What was most memorable about it is my husband was desperately trying to get his post-doc internship applications in on time when the power went out. We had to go stay in a hotel several hours away for a few days just so he could turn in his applications. We also lost a lot of groceries, which I’m afraid I’m so used to by now, living in SE Michigan which apparently has an unstable power grid. The outages have been significant enough that the Michigan government formally chewed out our power supplier. I’m sure with all the AI data farms moving in, it’s going to be even better.
I didn’t actually see this, as I was 7 miles away. This was the picture in the Wichita Eagle the next day, probably taken about a half mile from the twister. That funnel was an absolute monster.
I’ve been “adjacent to” three tornadoes in my life. The first was the Dallas tornado of 1957. We were on our way to pick up my older sister from school and 5-year old me got a great view of the cloud a couple of blocks ahead of us ripping a house to bits. The second was while we were staying at a motel in Kansas City. I looked out the window and saw a cloud across the street and two parking lots down before my father herded us into the bathroom and kept us in there for a good ten minutes.
The third time I was working at a radio station in Kentucky. We had been broadcasting weather bulletins all evening but had no idea what was happening outside. Then the lights flickered and the building shook for a few seconds. The next morning they determined either the tornado or a microburst had missed the station by about 200 feet.
I haven’t experienced any natural disasters beyond a bare sniff of one earthquake. I grew up outside Portland, OR but was too young to remember Mount St. Helens. I missed the one earthquake that hit - while we were on vacation in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Not long after that we moved there, but in the 20 years I was there the only earthquake I felt was a 4.4 that lasted only a long as it took me to realize it wasn’t a truck driving past our apartment building.
My current home town in the middle of Puget Sound got inexplicably hit by an F2 tornado a few years ago, just over a mile from our home at the time. We were all at work or daycare in other towns.
Arkansas doesn’t do ice and snow very well. We’ve had our trials. Mostly I don’t want to be out in it. Nobody knows how to drive in it around here. Power always goes out.
Tornadoes have always been a part of life here. We had a pretty bad one, right after we built the house. Lots of rain, hail and straight line winds, then the clear off and Mr. Tornado shows up. We lost the new barn roof and lots of trees. The log home stood the test. Altho I had frightening visions of tumbling logs crushing us all.
Several small one since then.
We had lots of foul weather right after Katrina. Pop up tornadoes were everywhere.
The Blizzard of 1978- Blizzard of 1978 This is my earliest memory. My dad had to walk part of the way home from work and I remember the back door to the house blowing open and him basically falling into the house.
The Flood of 1982 1982 Flood in Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana on Allen INGenWeb Project Our street flooded to the point we couldn’t get out but our house stayed dry. A lot of other people in the area weren’t so lucky. I remember walking down to my friend’s house and the water had basically made a moat around his house.
The summer just before I turned 10, my parents sprung for the biggest family vacation we ever took - an week long, all-inclusive stay at a horse ranch in Wyoming just east of Yellowstone National Park.
It was 1988. Still the biggest wildfires the park has ever seen.
It didn’t substantially affect the trip that much. No activities were canceled including tours inside the park. But it was a background concern and major spectacle. We stopped for photos of a moose with her calf, and a helicopter filled its bucket in the river right behind them. The sun was a deep red at noon. Fires crossed the main highway between when we drove in and drove home, and the difference was incredible.
That must have been more excitement than y’all had bargained for.
Which reminds me of a similar vacation gone wrong event from my childhood. One I’d pretty well forgotten about altogether; haven’t thought about it in decades.
I’m 10 or 12 so it’s 1970ish. Dad, Mom, me & my younger bros fly to Hawaii for a couple weeks’ vacation. We’d stay a few days on each of Oahu, Kauai, Maui, and Hawaii. On Kauai they’d rented a beachfront cottage set on a low rocky bluff ~20 feet above the sea.
So we’re having our fun touristing beaching days on Kauai. Then a Tropical Storm showed up. Less than a hurricane, but not much less.
We did not get swept out to sea. But some other similar buildings within a half-mile of us did.
We now sort of take for granted the level of early warning and public awareness that comes from all of us having an internet terminal in our pocket 24/7. Things were different then. It was hard to get current news and it was hard to formulate an alternate plan in real time.
When I was 9 years old we were living near Charlotte, NC, when Hurricane Hugo hit the area in 1989. Normally that far inland we would just get the remnants of hurricanes, just some rain and a little wind. But Hugo was still producing hurricane force winds as far west as Tennessee (Not unlike Helene last year in that sense).
My main memory was the we didn’t have power for around two weeks after the storm. And thus, school was canceled for at least that long. I recall my parents playing the game of “use up as much of the perishable food in the fridge as possible before it spoils” the first day after the storm. And cooking it on the Coleman camp stove in the backyard, since we had an electric stove. And since we had well water, we had to use buckets of water from the nearby creek to flush the toilets.
Another “no power for days” event, a major ice storm hit Raleigh my senior year of college. There was no power at my apartment for around a week, but the campus had power because it was on a separate substation. I showered at the gym and spent a lot of time in the computer lab.
Since moving to California I’ve been lucky with natural disasters, which I know is the opposite of everyone’s stereotype of California. Sacramento doesn’t really get earthquakes like the coastal areas, and there haven’t been any fires that have directly impacted me, yet. Hopefully I’m far enough from the “urban - wildland interface” to be effected. Knock on wood (with a proper amount of defensable space around it).
Discussed contemporaneously starting in this post of the relevant thread at the time and going on for almost a hundred posts more; and also with a brief look-back overview in this one post 5 years later about similar disasters:
In one of the intervening years I was asked to write a speech for an anniversary message and I recall some key phrases I put in there about what it had been like: The reminder that there is power in this word that will laugh at what Man builds or plans. How millions saw what they or their parents built over a lifetime of post WW2 progress, brought down overnight… living what to planners in the mainland is a theoretical “nightmare scenario” of the whole grid going dark. Spending days with half your towns and people unreachable by any means; weeks with aid piling up at the port because the roads and trucks were not enough to spread it while the sick and infirm at the other end of those roads suffered; months to restore basic normality. But we did not fall apart. We did not turn on each other. We all had the decency to address mutual survival first; it was only after that was sort of secured but permanent recovery seemed to not get off the blocks for a prolonged time, that we started asking what was done wrong and how to change that.
…
That whole event saw me displaced to DC for over 6 years to work with the PR offices in DC liaising with the Federal agencies in recovery. I became too damn familiar with FEMA and CDBG-DR and the Corps of Engineers Civil Works and all that comes with them. During that time I had to also follow in-absence the 2020 Puerto Rico Earthquakes and a little bit of Covid. After the latest change of both PR and US administration earlier this year I was done at that post, and have made my way back to the Island.
One thing that many of us have seen is that with this scale of disaster, on the one hand there is no real going back to “the way it was before”, but on the other, neither does it somehow Change Everything Completely. Some things and ways are gone for good and need to be replaced by new ones, but others endure, maybe having been forced to evolve a bit quicker than they were, maybe because people need something to stay constant. And you can tell everyone who was around and aware for it does carry it in them. The way there’s any “routine” power outage, any report that there’s some low pressure off Cape Verde, any slight tremor, and the hackles rise. The immediate anxiety every time anyone talks about the FEMA budget (because sure, they have generally been disappointing from New Orleans to New Jersey to Puerto Rico to Maui to North Carolina, but it’s what there IS and we got nothing like it!).
So here we are, now at Hurricane peak, and watching the daily reports, as the way it is. Necessary preparations taken when called for and always hoping for the best.
Too many hurricanes to count. Most I just ride out, some we evacuate for.
House has flooded twice.
Katrina and TS Claudette in 2021. Both took about a year to rebuild and move back in.
Katrina was unusual even for a major hurricane. The destruction was SO widespread that it was hard to handle the aftermath. In many disasters the actual damage is limited to a mile or so. I have been to flood zones where one could be gutting a house and walk to McDonalds for lunch. Katrina spread out over almost 300 miles and knocked out services, power water and roads, throughout. People couldn’t find places to stay within driving distance. It elevated banks to critical infrastructure.
There were many complaints about FEMA at the time. But no one ever said local governments could do better. We had logging machines from the Pacific Northwest down here helping to clear up the roads and debris. County government wasn’t going to be able to arrange that. FEMA is a pain in the ass-but better than any alternative. Our county assigned a couple of office staff managing the paperwork for FEMA claims immediately after the storm. By having all the paperwork available, we were reimbursed for almost all the expenses. Those clerks saved the local government millions and years of arguing. Still wasn’t easy, but all the local governments learned that is what is necessary to recover.
Personally, no one likes worrying every year that one’s house might become uninhabitable overnight. But OTOH, unlike a fire or major earthquake, we can fix the damage after a flood.
Oh, and recovering from any natural disaster takes years. People are living in the area again after a few weeks/months, but to rebuild takes multiple years. Not less than that.
Og help me, yes! Puerto Rico had to create a whole new government agency to help all the subdivisions and public dependencies learn the processes and get the paperwork straight, and to serve as clearinghouse for the aid.
My personal record is 1 for 2 and the 1 that did hit our area did so pretty darn gently. If that town had underground utilities instead of snaking them through mature trees on mostly wooden poles, my record in terms of inconvenience avoided would be 0 for 2.
Thing is, I like avoiding inconvenience and I don’t find taking a short-notice vacation all that burdensome.
I grant completely that that’s a luxury that comes with petless, kidless living, and being either retired or in a very flexible job situation. So not a solution for everyone. But a solution for me & my now-late wife.
Living in the UK, the ground is quite benign and the climate is rubbish but not usually very exciting. Not usually, but a night in October ‘87 we had a hurricane(ish), and in the south-east of England with winds blowing up to 100mph there was devastation and 18 people were killed. About 15 million trees were blown down, to widespread chagrin, many on to roads and railways causing major transport delays. I only got 2 days off school, what with the many stiff upper lips clearing everything as fast as possible.
Around 19 years later, late evening 27th February 2008 in the east Midlands of England to be precise, I was alone watching tv and felt my heavy La-Z-Boy chair rocking and swaying. I thought someone must be behind me playing a trick, as if someone could do that to a massive armchair, but no it was a minor earthquake - my only one. I think a few churches were damaged and someone’s tea cosy fell on the floor.
Not sure if this counts, but on 19 July 2022 I was out running errands, again in the east Midlands of England, when the temperature hit 40.3°C (104.54°F) - the UK’s hottest ever recorded temperature. As I’d spent the 2008-10 and 2013-18 in Saudi working (indoors) when temps regularly hit 46°C (114.8°F), I thought “No problem, I’ll just keep the windows open.” I lasted about 3 minutes before the windows went up and the a/c went on full. High temperatures in the UK are sultry, stifling, and loathsome.
I was in Seattle (so between Whidbey and Mt. St. Helens) at the time, and the family joke is that it’s my fault. I was playing upstairs and my dad asked what I did. It wasn’t me.
Didn’t really enjoy the 1993 Storm of the Century, especially as we didn’t have shovels for digging out our cars, but at least we didn’t lose power. We ended up using Tupperware to clear the nearly 2 feet of snow. We received folding snow shovels for the following Christmas.
Lost a tree due to the remnants of Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
Also experienced Super Storm Sandy. We were visiting family in PA and they lost power for 2 weeks. We flew home a few days after the storm came through, as Newark was open. Driving to Newark and flying home was a very strange experience.
Had to boil water after the water supply got contaminated during the August 2005 floods in Switzerland.
Spent way too much time trying to get to work after getting 42 cm of snow last November. Not really a disaster, but it was the most snow ever.
