I've been in three tornadoes, and every one of them sucked. The only one of substance, and the only one which actually hit me, was an EF-2 that started as a water spout, came ashore, tore up a bunch of shit and then side-swiped the hotel I was staying at. Fortunately, my room was in the interior of the hotel (though near the impacted area) and I was hiding in a closet, so there was just the standard cosmetic damage in the room, crazy pressure changes in my ears and noise that I felt in my bones. The other two took place on my ranch, both at night, and both of which I saw from the house (flash lights and windows; I'm not the smartest person, but that's my gut reaction when something loud is outside... there was also a gun in the other hand, but that wouldn't have done much). They only lasted for 15-30 seconds -- though it felt like hours -- and straight decimated some massive oak trees. I consider myself lucky on both occasions that they turned away from me, because the first one was only 100 yards or so, and the second was about 150; they could have murdered my house.... You know those wooden train whistles you played with as a kid? That's what they sounded like. If they were projected through an amp. Regardless, nature has let me out relatively unscathed. I know I'm one of the fortunate ones on this board. I know that there have been others who have been through (legit) tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and living in Canada. Focus: Have you been in a natural disaster? What was it like?
I'm sure some past threads around here count as natural disasters... and I'm still recovering from them.
1989 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course I live about 80 miles away and it was just a nice rolling quake to us. When it happened we all looked at each other and said "Somebody got shook up pretty hard" It was not till I got home and saw on the television how bad it was. When I lived in San Francisco I was present for a couple of pretty good shakers, but nothing to get upset with. We get tornado warnings a couple of times a year, but I have never been near one. As far as natural disasters this place is pretty boring. If you want to talk about man made disasters, well that is a different story.
I happen to live in an area that is pretty drama free weather wise. In fact the only thing that has happened in recent years that freaked me out enough to actually be scared in my own home was a few years ago we had some thunderstorms and wind events that were ripping trees out by the roots and landing them on people's houses and cars and in roads and stuff (there was a near miss in my cul-de-sac with a huge tree, it landed just the right way to miss their house). We haven't had anything that bad since then, but it did make me realize how fortunate I am to live in an area where most of the time I don't have to worry about loss of life or significant home damage because nature is being an asshole. Found a picture: Spoiler
Most of the natural distastes down here on the coast are, of course, hurricanes. Hurricanes are no big deal. In my short life I've probably weathered a couple dozen of them. You'll want to evacuate a cat 4-5 because the wind can make a tree fall on your house or push a car into your bedroom wall, but generally they are like big hazy rain storms with overcast skies, constant wind, and a couple days of rain. Sometimes there is a bit of flooding, though if you are in a low lying area you know it's coming because you'll flood in a big summer lightening storm too. A couple weeks ago we got a dose of that big storm that moved across the entire US. I was convinced a tornado was going to hit my house and we were all gonna die. Mobile got something like 6in of rain in an hour but Pensacola got it worse....I believe they had 21in in less than 24 hours. Whole long sections of roads were washed out, sinks holes abound, and everything flooded. This city flooded too but nothing like that, so I'm thankful. Partially because I had to go into work that night (I pussed out on calling in).
When I was 6 years old this F4 tornado was on the ground for about an hour. The worst of the destruction was in a path about 40km long and almost a kilometer wide. My memory of it is pretty patchy, but what remains clear is the noise of it. It was loud as fuck to hear, but what sticks with me most was how I felt the sound of it.
I was a young kid living in Wisconsin, and we had a tornado, which is rare. I was outside, riding my Big Wheel, and the sky got incredibly dark, almost green-black. I never saw anything like it before or since. As I was riding up my driveway, I saw something start to drop out of the sky (at the time I didn't know it was a tornado) and I raced into the house. It was fairly noisy outside already due to the wind, so my mom got me and my sister into the basement under the stairs. It was really noisy from wind, but the tornado touched down miles away and didn't come close to us at all, but holy shit, when I saw that thing I knew it was bad fucking news. Can't imagine living through one of those up close.
When I was in San Diego, I experienced a pretty real earthquake that I'm sure Wheelz experienced too. It was in the spring, I was in the house with my brother and the dog. I was chilling on my bed when I started hearing this really low rumbling sound, then the bed started to shake a bit and I finally knew it was an earthquake. I decided at this point to run down the stairs and get the dog and my brother and go outside. It was surreal. All the plates in the cupboard were chattering, there were waves in our pool. This went on for around a solid minute. The waves were really impressive, it was more like the water in the pool was moving around like it was in a bathtub and someone just got in, the waves would get to one side then rebound back. It lasted long enough for me to realize what was going on and to take it in. Apparently it was bigger than the one that hit Haiti, thank God for building codes. I've experienced a few since then. Its weird to be sitting on a couch and have it start vibrating beneath you.
Does an ice storm count? These were my front steps this past winter: Spoiler To answer your question, it was fucking cold. And slippery. And, when it all melted straight into my garage due to poor grading (YOU DRIVEWAY PAVING RAT BASTARDS), I got to enjoy the sweet pleasure of shoveling 100 gallons of water out of my home during a freak mid-January thunderstorm.
The closest I've come to a natural disaster has been some ice storms in North Texas (Ice is a motherfucker. You can't win.) and then the summer of 2011 when Texas was scorched. We had nearly 100 days of 100+ degree temps, and while normally it's hot and dry in Texas, that summer, Texas was BROWN. And dead. Things that would have been at least dull green were brittle and cracked. But stuff like tornados - one passed by my gym a couple of years ago, hailstorms - eh. It's ice. Motherfucker. That shit destroyed my boss's house a couple years back. Nothing like earthquakes or hurricanes. Just small stuff. So not 'disaster' exactly.
Oh please... as a fellow Canadian, that's not a "natural disaster"... that's "winter". Here's me digging out the Jeep.
With all of Netts hard work and several open threads now, lets stay on topic. The WDT is for randomness....and Bewildered's bodily functions.
When that moderately sized earthquake hit the east coast in 2012 I was sitting in LaGuardia airport waiting for a flight. The seats at the gate are all connected with a long metal bar so they are effectively one unit. If someone shifts around, you feel it. When my seat started rocking, i assumed some kid was jumping up and down on a seat farther down the row, but when I looked up to see what was going on, everyone else was looking around too. The I noticed the building sort of swaying back and forth. Since we were in an airport in New York City, the immediate explanation that came to mind was that it was terrorist related - there was no explosion, so maybe they had rammed a truck or plane into the terminal. All of this ran through my head in about 30 seconds, then the swaying stopped, and a few minutes later reports started coming over the TV at the gate that an earthquake had ocurred.
When I wrote the original post, I totally blanked on the time I was in an earthquake. Also known as "the time I learned I have no self preservation instincts while drunk." It was about a year after the Japan tsunami, so obviously that was still on everyone's mind as my family was vacationing in Maui. I started drinking around 10 am or so with some rum and POG, and now here I was at 6 pm ready for dinner and thoroughly shitfaced. My wife and I were sitting on a cabana beside the beach waiting with my sister and her son, waiting on everyone else in the group to meet us. That's when the entire cabana (like a lounge chair thing) shook violently, and I turned to my wife, in all drunken seriousness, and asked, "Did you fart?" At the time I was drunk texting my brother in law back home, probably about how drunk I was. He was watching the Maui invitational, and right after I asked my wife the fart question, he sent me a text saying all the lights went out and the stadium started shaking on the camera. My sister was standing up at the time, and asked me if she was just really drunk or did something happen because she felt like she was swaying for a second there. That's when my brain started to tick.... I wasn't the only one who felt shaking.... lights don't normally go out in stadiums.... Hawaii is on the pacific rim of fire.... earthquake!!!! Cool!!! We all had a good laugh about it. But it was immediately followed by a unanimous realization that earthquakes cause tsunamis. And we're sitting on the beach. FUCK!!! We ran back into the hotel (we were staying on the 11th floor) and like a bunch of drunken idiots took the damn elevator up. We later found out that the hotel was on rollers, which dissipated the shock of earthquakes, though they exaggerated the effects of the movement at the higher stories. My equilibrium is all screwy thanks to a brain surgery, and the entire room moving a matter of feet in all directions did nothing to ease my stomach. By the way, after shocks still feel like roller coaster rides when you are 11 stories high. We later learned the initial earthquake and resulting after shocks ranged from a 2.something to the strongest one being I think a 4.2. I can't imagine what a "big" earthquake would feel like.
Hurricanes Jean, Frances, Wilma. Between 2004 and 2005. Completely shredded my roof. Each of them I must have had 15 buckets catching water from leaks. Well, trying to catch water. The day after the mold was so bad I went around spritzing every wall with Tilex. Lifesaver, otherwise the house would have been uninhabitable. The noises aren't so bad. Just a lot of wind howling, heavy rain. A good gust would shake the house, but nothing more. Frances stayed on us almost 24 hours. Fucking stalled. I enjoyed that... What f'd with my brain was when Jean came by 2 weeks after Frances. We had a temporary tarp and all night I heard this tarp flapping in the wind. Freaked me out, like a shredded, broken sail. I lose my shit anymore when I hear that kind of mad rustling or debris flying around. No shit, flags make my heart pump. Same with plastic flying around in the wind. Army Corps of Engineers put up a fail proof tarp. Took almost another year for a roofer to be free to replace the roof. In that time we almost got fined by the city for having a tarp. Local government are cunts. They should be eaten dick first by wild dogs. Luckily enough people complained about the same thing and all fines were dropped. We had a chunk of Hurricane Andrew in '92, but it didn't do jack, but give me a day off school. Funny thing is we had so many more tropical waves hit, and even named tropical storms, and school wasn't cancelled. Imagine being on a school bus with no seatbelts in 3 feet of visibility, 30+mph winds and a foot of water.
Local governments in towns and cities are purely there to make money so they can pay off back-handers to their buddies. I think rural municipalities/local governments give remarkably less of a fuck. All Governments are corrupt as fuck here. FOCUS: We were in Durban when this happened (check the left column of that paper) and got across the John Ross bridge about 5 minutes before this. Fortunately, because we live in an apartment block on top of a hill and are 2 stories up and the block is made of clay brick and not just concrete, we don't get flooded at all. I think I may have used up my life's supply of luck as a 5 year-old missing that shit with the bridge. 80 odd people died. Bear in mind that was a less-than-18 month-old bridge - that was also, at the time, a National Road (i.e. Interstate) bridge.