[karla_sd]

I've never experienced anything as scary as a hurricane or earthquake. I've spent many hours in my mom & dad's cellar waiting out tornadoes. We've had 2 close calls to the house. Had damage to some nearby buildings but nobody was ever hurt. We've had a few wild fires close by too. But not so recently. A couple of times have had some scary experiences being stuck in blizzards. To me an earthquake would be really terrifying.

[Kittimom]

hurricanes - lots of em. i'm with you, berkely - i was in a couple of scary situations as a kid, and now i'm really nervous during hurricanes. thank heavens we moved to new england, where the nor' easters aren't so bad - at least not yet. lots of blizzards - really scary to drive through them when you get stuck on the road in one. no earthquakes or tornados - they both seem terrifying to me since you basically get no warning - at least with a hurricane you can board up your house or drive north or something - but a tornado over your head all of a sudden? or the ground shaking under your feet with no warning? yikes!!!

[Nora_B]

I was working in Los Gatos, CA, during the 1989 earthquake. I was alone at work and the building was a single story and very flexible. I was on the telephone with someone at a bank in Tracy (which is where I live now). I was able to tell the person that we where having an earthquake just before the line was cut and then I took cover under my desk. It really shook up the walls and knocked over the water cooler.

The highway was damaged, but I made it home okay to Mountain View. The TV had fallen over and all the cabinets in the kitchen were open, but the contents were safe in the dishwasher.

Someone from our running club had just escaped being crushed under the Cypress Bridge.

[adrianad]

wow ! it's really interesting reading about everyone's horror stories. i've got to tell you that with the recent earthquake in China the whole thing about a natural disaster happening at any given moment at any given place is just plain scary :eek: :eek:

we tend to have very destructive earthquakes here in israel, but only every few centuries. they keep telling us that a very big one is expected soon, but that's the same thing i always heard when i lived in southern california.

may God take care of all the poor people who are currently affected by an act of nature. i just felt so useless when i saw some news coverage tonight.... no wonder i never watch the news. whenever i do watch for about 20 seconds it seems there is always a disaster somewhere, no?

i just hope we all keep safe from whatever *thing* that may affect the area where we live, be it a natural disaster or an on-going war. God is good and does take care of people :D

[Kelly1977]

Very interesting thread, since we are from all over.

Tornados in Indiana are my only experience. Mostly further away. A few times having to gather up in the middle of a store or sometimes in the cafeteria at work until they go away.

I think 3 years ago I was taking classes for work at a local college about an hour away from home. People who lived in that area in the class started receiving cell phone calls about a tornado heading that way. We were in a center class with no windows and suddenly the power went out. We were instructed to head to the bathrooms (yeah right, I am not dying crowded into a tiny bathroom with 100 people). So, naturally, many of us headed outside to see. The tornado was right there. The college had a pole barn with a machine class in it probably 20 ft from the door we came out of and the tornado was right behind it. People were running from that building with their eyes wide open, screaming. I looked up at the tornado and saw debris, chairs, and whatnot flying around in it. Tornados are really big when you are that close. I deemed it necessary to re-enter the building at that time and wait for the inevitable. Those still outside said it made a 90 degree turn right before the building and headed for a cornfield. I came back outside to watch it then. The tornado had come right through that town, mostly down a road. It did rip the roof and sides off of a roller rink with kids in (no one was hurt) and demolish a business with a lot of semis all turned upside down. I remember reading those working there hiding under a large table watching semis get tossed around. So, yeah, if that tornado would have went a half block more in the direction I saw it then it would have demolished the building I was in. And oddly, I never really felt fear. Excitement, curiousity, and waiting for what was coming, but not fear. My family was scared having heard about it on the news. I still don't fear tornados. I am afraid of every single other thing in life, but not tornados, lol. I think the wildfires raging near my home, if we had them, would be absolute terror.

[BerkleyJL]

Growing up in a military family, I've been all over the place and had the chance to risk the wide variety of natural disasters this country has to offer. :)

However, blizzards and tornadoes have largely left me alone (knock on wood).
Earthquakes in California were all minor with epicenters far from my home.

But hurricanes...I've been through some hurricanes! The first hurricane I ever remember was David. My father took care of that one though, 'cause I was really young. The worst I've ever been through was Andrew. Our house came apart around us, my job and school were both destroyed...it was a mess. One year later I watched the movie with my dad and stepmother who went through the storm with me. It was very hard to watch, and we all cried a lot.

Three years after that, I experienced my first hurricane as a father, husband and home owner. It was a category 1 (Danny) but I was a complete wreck. My ex-wife had to call my dad to get a full understanding of why I was panicking and having the whole family hide in the kitchen (only room without windows) on the floor with our heads below counter level.

Blech.

[englz]

I was in San Francisco for the '89 quake.

My now-DH was at the World Series game in Oakland, and couldn't get home for hours. I went to his house and stayed with his 15-year-old daughter, who was petrified. It was a long time before things felt normal again


i had a newish baby and a toddler and my parents were coming to visit us in tampa in a couple days. i was painting the living/dining room of the tiny house we had and i was irritated with my (eventually to be ex) husband for not only not helping, but watching stupid baseball (sorry cherie) while i was working so i couldn't even listen to music. and then the baseball stopped and the screen went blank. it was so startling how quickly everything happened. the pictures of the collapsed bridges and the people crushed in their cars was heartbreaking.

it must have been so scary to live through.

[Capeclown]

Mostly Hurricanes for me, though no bad ones. A few category 1 and 2 that we mostly ate and drank our way through. We never had to evacuate.

I think I would most fear a fire. I had a friend in San Diego who almost got surrounded by the wildfires out there. How terrifying.

[KSB50]

I was in San Francisco for the '89 quake. I can't remember exactly but I think it was a 7.something. I had just moved here and was the new boss for a newspaper with 50 employees, some of whom were out on assignment at the time.
When the quake started I was at my desk writing, and the computer started sliding into my lap. I looked up and locked eyes with a guy standing across the office. We both ran for the doorway, not realizing that it was surrounded by glass (which didn't break, thank God). Our building was shaken pretty well. Things fell, large cracks appeared in the stairwells. One of our reporters was actually on the Bay Bridge when a section collapsed. We found out she was okay because she called CBS news in New York and we heard her on TV, reporting!
We were just finishing that day's paper and I pencilled in "Earthquake Edition" in shaky letters and we got it to the printers, which was far enough away not to be affected. (Back in the day, we actually pasted up....)
Eventually we all walked home. We could see the fires burning in the Marina, but everything else was dark. No power. My now-DH was at the World Series game in Oakland, and couldn't get home for hours. I went to his house and stayed with his 15-year-old daughter, who was petrified. It was a long time before things felt normal again
DH is quite unflappable when it comes to earthquakes. I still worry. In fact, one of my projects now that I'm done with school is to revisit our earthquake supplies and emergency plan. There have been little quakes around our region and of course the big one in China. It always makes me think the Big One is coming. An article in the paper about a month ago said there is a 99.9% chance of a big one in the 20 years. My kids go to school within walking distance, We live in a fairly safe area (many of the houses have been through the 1906 quake). But I still worry. k

[WillowDanin]

I've been pretty lucky. I grew up in Minnesota, so I experienced the summer tornado warnings and hunkering down in the basement like Mags, but never once had a close call. The year we moved to Oregon was the "100 year flood" with landslides, bad windstorms, trees falling on houses and cars, but again, I personally didn't suffer any losses. Since moving here I've experienced very small earthquakes...what a weird feeling! But nothing that ever caused any damage.

I don't know if I have any fears of any specific type of disaster. I'm too far away from the coast to worry about tsunamis (although that doesn't stop DBF, who has regular nightmares about them for some unknown reason). Maybe if I ever experienced a really big earthquake I'd worry about them more. There are volcanoes all around this area so I suppose there's a possibility of another eruption, but it seems like the people in the area got plenty of warning before Mt. Saint Helens blew her stack. The people who died were the ones who refused to leave. I'm not that stubborn. :rolleyes:

[englz]

i lived through the bad hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 in florida on the coast only a few minutes from tampa bay. i only had to evacuate for charley but it was really nerve wracking to have hurricanes every other day (it seemed) from june to november. i think it was during hurricane frances that i was in california, and my boys were back home. they were supposed to visit relatives, but the trains were all shut down, and basically everything went wrong. i was a wreck, and when people in CA heard we were from FL, the reaction was alway, 'omg-its everyone okay?'

the other thing was getting the USA today at the hotel and seeing a picture of someone running a skeedoo down the middle of bayshore blvd in tampa on the cover. 1/4 mile from my house.

the news coverage of devastation that year, and the following year, culminating with the horrors of hurricane katrina was very hard to live with. the guilty sense of being lucky with the horrible nagging feeling of inevitably being among those you saw covered on the news was a constant.

back in the 80's i also experienced hurricane gloria, but i was in my early 20s and we had a party, after putting tape up on the windows. :D

i think i would most fear tornadoes. i've seen first hand the destruction of tornadoes, and the complete unpredictability and power of them scares the crap out of me. with a hurricane at least you know it's coming. i've never experienced a real earthquake.

[adrianad]

some earthquakes while living in southern california. it was scary, but being the Colombian that i am i took my father's instructions to heart and slept in the door jam area! my parents lived through some real dingers in Colombia and they think the ones in southern california are a picnic.

i had a horrible few years after watching The Wizard of Oz, that we'd have tornados destroy everything around us and that a witch would appear :rolleyes: there are no tornadoes in the part of southern california that i grew up in because of the huge mountain ranges surrounding the area. but it took a lot of convincing to get me to believe anyone about those coming-tornados :eek:

here in israel we live in un-natural circumstances on a daily basis: terror, terror and more terror.

i'll take a few earthquakes, bad blizzards, power-outages, etc., any day over the situation here !

inspite of everything going on around us, i love my little country :D :D

[hansolo11]

We lived in Southern CA during the Northridge earthquake. That was really terrifying. And the aftershocks kept coming and coming. We also had a smaller earthquake after moving to Seattle. Not quite as scary, but it was during the day when the kids were at school and it was stressful until we knew everyone was okay.

We also had a horrible wind storm a couple of winters ago. Maybe you oldtimers remember how long we were without power up here. Laura (Ponypal) had it pretty bad. I think she was almost two weeks without power from that storm. We live surrounded by huge trees and during the storm you could look out and see them just bending all the way over. We huddled in the basement, afraid that one of them would come crashing into our house. We were lucky, but several of our neighbors were not.

Growing up in Eastern Washington, we had several windstorms that I don't think anyone would really consider natural disasters, but they were pretty severe. We had a very large farm, growing tomatoes in greenhouses. Really bad windstorms would come up and rip the greenhouses to shreds. After a couple of seasons of losing crops, my dad finally couldn't pull it back together and we ended up losing the farm. So, yeah, it was a disaster to us.

[lbowz]

I lost almost everything I owned (which wasn't really a whole lot) in Hurricane Andrew. The apartment I had just rented was gone - no walls, no floor, nothing but a concrete foundation and a few pipes sticking up. Now I'm in the midwest and fear tornados more than anything. When those sirens go off, my husband will always look at the weather report and try to tell me that the danger is too far east or north or whatever. I don't care. I'm in the basement. The kids are in the laundry room in the basement and we're staying until the warning is over!

[magdakma]

Well when I was growing up tornados were a common occurrence. The sirens would blow and we'd have to head to the basement. My Dad would make sure we were all safe down in the basement then head upstairs and outside "to watch"-- I always wanted to be outside watching with Dad and once he let me and my Mom FREAKED OUT.

Once when I was 14 and on a detassling crew we saw a tornado on the ground far away....that was cool but we had to get back on the bus and go the other direction and wait it out.

Then once after DH and I met we were bored and tried to chase a tornado based on TV reports of where it was and where it was headed....we never got near it but we ended up in a town 2 hours away so we stopped for mexican food and margaritas! That was when I realized that I loved DH.

When I was a child (8 or 9) my little friend and I got caught up in a tornado at the local swimming pool. It came up so fast that they had just announced the pool was closing and everyone was to go home when it hit (not directly but it was 2 pm and pitch black and very windy)...my friend and I were trying to walk to my house (not too far away) and we couldnt move becuase of the wind and there was sand and debris hitting us continuously. We finally just sat down on the sidewalk because we weren't sure even where we were. We were bawling and screaming and i heard my moms voice...she had driven to get us and she threw us into the car and drove us home and put us all in the basement...the power was out and we had to stay down there all afternoon. That was a day when there were 20+ tornados in NE Iowa...thankfully none of them hit us directly and the only damage in our neighborhood was downed trees and power lines. That was the only time I've ever been scared during a tornado. Years later my Mom said that she had never been so scared in her life...she thought we were going to die. She didn't stop shaking for two days! I never picked up on her fear at 8 years old.

I think the natural disaster that I fear the most is an earthquake because I'm not familiar with them and there is no warning! I'm going to SF in August for a conference and I keep thinking about earthquakes!!!

[magdakma]

Have you ever experienced a natural disaster first hand? (i.e. flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake)

Tell us about it!

If you haven't (or even if you have) what natural disaster do you fear most and why?