I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland on the east side right in a neighborhood that borders Lake Erie and one of the rivers that deposits into said lake. My neighborhood floods usually once every couple years. Sometimes twice in a year, sometimes it doesn't for 4-5 years. Just depends on the snow thawing, rainstorms, etc. Not a big deal as most people love the neighborhood and the neighbors that they deal with it. It covers the roads and yards maybe 6"-1'-0" typically. The yards all have amazing green grass as the floods always replenish. The water gets into garages, but everybody just puts stuff up off the ground and hoses it out. In 1989, there was a really bad rain storm, longer and more rain than most that happen. There hadn't been dredging in the river like they did in the past, plus a few other problems. The biggest of all was a dam up river breaking. It was the flood of floods. No recorded floods got high enough to enter houses. This one was 2 1/2 feet inside our house. We picked up stuff in the garage like normal and even a few things inside up on beds or higher when we knew it was getting really bad. Didn't really matter. It destroyed the home and pretty much everything inside of it. I was 11 and lost almost everything I owned. It by no means was a flood nearly as bad as the big river floods down south that cover homes completely, but it was still devastating. To this day, I don't put stock much into objects as that is all they are. They can be gone in an instant. It was people, family, friends that came together to support each other that emerged as the important things in life. That ended up being a nice lesson for an 11 year old. No loss of life or even any injuries as it was just some water that got much higher than normal, but still the worst storm, damage-wise, I've gone through.
I know I've posted about this a few times. One of my biggest fears in life is to be caught in a tornado. That finally happened, in 2007. Was a sunny, hot, perfect BBQ sort of day, then all of a sudden.. it really started to get windy, the clouds literally zoomed by, then all of a sudden, wtf.. the wind shifted direction and clouds formed a huge ass funnel cloud and head directly for the farm. The end result - trashed the family farm, and there's a video of the exact tornado on youtube, taken right outside of my sister's ex boyfriend's farm. Only maybe 50 people saw it in person, but millions on youtube. All I was able to get was this lousy cellphone camera shot, as it literally came and went.
I've posted before about my parents and I's near-escape from a flood - it washed away the John Ross bridge (which was about a year old and concrete - it'd replaced an old wooden structure) which we'd traveled over about 5 minutes before it gave way. We were on our way back from Eshowe to Durban - my mom had to give a public presentation there. That flood is referenced here, but I can't find much other info on the flood (it's the 1987 one with 506 people dead - a dartmouth.edu page says 300 died). That was probably awesome shit to me as a 5 year old, but I think my parents were probably pretty freaked.
Growing up I remember 2 weather events that were both hurricanes. The first was in 1981-ish when my family was vacationing on St. John in the US Virgin Islands. They told us to scram because the hurricane was due to hit the island. We ended up in this old covenant turned hotel in old San Juan Puerto Rico and due the thick walls we all felt very safe. I remember drinking hot chocolate, having ice cube fights, swimming in the pool in the rain, and watching the Flintstones in Spanish. The second was hurricane Diana which in 1984 came close to my boarding school located on coastal Massachusetts. Since my dorm was right on the water they made us stay in the gym for most of the storm but they did let us out for a bit. A friend and I went to go smoke ciggys and on out way back decided to check out the harbor. We were walking across the athletic fields when all of a sudden a gust of wind carried both of us about fifty feet. Soon we were timing our jumps with the gusts giggling our sophomore heads off. The boats in the harbor were not so lucky, I think over eighty of them were swept off their moorings and a sky crane was brought in to pluck them from the salt marsh. One yacht was stuck on the breakwater in front of our dorm and its bowsprit was a few feet away from our dorm masters living room window. Other than a couple Christmas blizzards and having a huge pine tree fall on our house during one of them, the weather is pretty mellow where I live. I don't ever remember tornadoes like the ones that hit the western part of the state ever happening before.