I was in my first earthquake when I was about 8 or 9. It was only a 6.3 or so, but it terrified me since I was sleeping on the second story when it struck and woke me. When I opened my eyes the house was literally swaying. By the time the aftershock hit, it was enough to make me break down and cry because I was convinced we’d all be killed. By the third or fourth quake of your life, it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, though.

No major changes, other than learning, as I aged, about the fact that I live in a very dangerous region of the world, and that when “the big one” goes off in Oregon it’ll rival any previous quakes the world over in recent history. When I actively think about it, it terrifies me and I want to move since it’s projected to be as high as 10.0. Most of the time, though, I don’t even think about it – even though we’re overdue according to the past time line. It’s hard to keep in mind all the time when, for the most part, earthquakes aren’t frequent here the way they are in California. So… I just hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, because the damage will be horrific.

Sorry if there are any errors, I’m typing from my phone and autocorrect doesn’t tend to like me very much.

Hurricane Sandy, newly separated, house was damaged somewhat, no power for twelve days. Not a good time in my life…..

I was once hit by a gamma ray burst. it stung a little.

Yes. It was called “Hurricane Elvis” here in Memphis, Tennessee, US. While driving to work, a freakishly strong wind and rain came barreling through most of the city. Massive trees were toppled, taking power lines down as they fell.

Have experienced mild earth tremors once.. during working hours. Entire office staff was outside in minutes. Fortunate enough not to experience any other furies of nature mentioned above. I am told about close encounter with a poisonous snake at very young age by parents though..it was at a feet distance from me when someone saw it and pulled me away..so lucky to be here now..)

Bunch of hurricanes. Par for the course, living in Florida. We don’t take them terribly seriously since our area hasn’t had a direct hit since 1921. We get hurricane-force winds but never the major impact. In 2012, I think, we had a tropical storm that I didn’t even know about until after it happened. Hurricane season is our normal rainy season anyway, so one day I had to basically swim my car home from downtown Tampa, and the next day we had a Cat 0 tornado hit the building, and I’m talking to a coworker like, “Man, the rain’s been intense lately, huh?” and he’s all, “Yeah, tropical storms do that.” Oh. Ha.

There was a pretty big blizzard my last winter in New York, but I was too young to worry about anything more than playing in the snow.

I was walking in Phoenix, AZ one day when I thought it seemed unusually warm, just on the high side of nice. That was June 26, 1990 when the official temp hit 122 F, the all time high for the city. The only people who noticed were pilots, whose take-off info did not go that high so they were grounded.

Earthquakes when I was growing up in California including the Sylmar quake in ‘71 (6.7).
That messed up my parents’ house a bit but it was liveable.

Hurricane Sandy in NYC in 2012, we were somewhat prepared for that but glad when the power finally came back on a week later. Played scrabble by candlelight.

I have been in a few quakes since I live in California. I was in a moderately sized one (5.2) in Santa Barbara with an epicenter about 3 miles from where I was standing. Made quite a mess.

And, I was living in the SF Bay Area in 1989 when the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck. Another mess, and many lives lost.

I landed in an airplane in Indonesia during a monsoon. The jet almost slid off the runway.

Other than having an earthquake kit and bracing some bookcases, weather and earthquakes don’t ask for life changes.

I live in forest fire land here in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern CA.and have had a few close calls but no tragedy.
It is part of the Northern CA. summer scene. Living on rural properties for almost 25 years now the most important thing is having an evacuation plan for your pets and livestock. We have 6 horses here, 4 dogs, 3 cats and 22 chickens, total, belonging to 3 of us. Kennels and horse trailers are on standby and there a large water truck on this property that might help keep a fire from spreading for a bit or out out any smaller blazes that might occur.

We just had a 5000+ acre wildfire burning about 25–30 miles south of here a few weeks ago. It took about 2 weeks to get it fully contained as the terrain here is very rugged with steep hills, mountains, canyons and hard to access from the ground, most of the attacks are air tanker attacks.
I have also been in plenty of earthquakes living in Southern CA. in my younger years. Some pretty good rollers and shakers.

This was the fire.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRti2nCR4Xg

I was ”flashed” by a rather tawdry looking fellow wearing nowt but a trench coat & a hard on
Gave me quite a shock as I was out on my run at the time & had no make up on or anything

I was actually crawling sround in the back of my cargo van in 89. The World series was on the radio and the van began rocking and shaking. I thought it was the guys at the moving and storage company (in whose lot I was parked) having some fun rocking the van at my expense. But the van continued rocking even as I stepped out to find MYSELF rocking and the van now dancing in front of me with the doors swinging. It was over as suddenly as it began & I jumped into the van immediately to begin the 4 mile journey home hoping to beat the inevitable traffic snarls. I peeled out of the lot and noticed an ominous column of smoke emanating from the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge. No changes. What can you do?

I’m in Kansas so it’s a regular occurance. I’ve only been really scared twice though.

Was in the house when it was hit by Lightning , that was interesting it did about $6000 damage in a half second.

I’ve had lightning pass through my body when I was standing in the living room. A split second later it hit a field about 10 yards from the house. It was mooky. My husband felt it too and we just looked at each other wide eyed. Before either of us could comment it hit. Damn it was loud too.

Tornadoes and hurricanes, more than once. You just keep your head down and hope to make it out the other side.

Stayed through many hurricanes. Staying for Hugo was a mistake. It was like a freight train was circling the house. The house shook violently in the gusts for hours. It was dark, but you could hear the trees spliting, and breaking, sometimes slamming into the house or uprooting. Very scary. Then when the eye came through, we went outside and it was dead calm,not a breeze. After a short while, more hours of crazy wind, rain, and butt clenching.

The morning after was surreal. Once we dislodged a tree that had stuck our door shut, we saw what was left. It really looked as if a giant bomb had went off.almost everything was badly damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of boats were piled everywhere on the streets. Hundreds more spread through the marsh. It took the better part of a decade to get things back to normal.

The problem with deciding not to leave as a hurricane approaches is , if during the storm you decide it’s too powerful, you can’t just pause it and leave. You’re in it until it stops.
Since Hugo I will go to a shelter if it’s above a category 3. Luckily we haven’t had a 4 recently.

In Denver in the 1950’s, I experienced several white-out blizzards in the winters, one tornado one summer, and several floods in the spring, our house was on high ground, but surrounded by water. In southern California for 30 years, there were many, many earthquakes and several fires which impacted us.

I visited Virginia Beach, VA during hurricane Floyd. The news reports made it seem worse than it was in that area. I went to the grocery store while it was in full force with lots of rain. I needed to stock up on food, and I bought a load of microwave meals – silly me, the electricity was out.

I was once looking out on the balcony of my aunt’s place during a storm when I saw lightning strike a watertower only a few hundred feet away.

Personal note. I don’t understand how you guys live in tornado prone areas. That seems crazy to me. But I guess y’all are used to it. Hurricanes suck, but we see them coming from a long way, so we have time to prepare.

Earthquakes seem just as scary. I ride ,well used to ride a motorcycle all the time. The thought of a quake happening while on 2 wheels would scare me. I hear my area is close to one of the biggest fault lines on the continent. But we haven’t had a real bad one in a long time.

Kudos to you brave Flutherites who live with these situations. It’s amazing what humans can come to accept as ‘normal. ’

Perhaps it is that ability to accept our environment that has led to the somewhat sedentary progress that has befallen humanity in the past dozen or so years.

A lot of hurricanes, growing up in the Northeast. As a kid I was too naive to be scared and so I loved them, thought they were exciting and wonderful, had to be ordered to stay indoors. Plenty of blizzards and thunderstorms too. Loved ‘em all, or most of them; maybe not quite so much when I was older.

Weather in the Midwest during my college days was much less kind. Lightning, hail, and snow out there in flat country really meant business. But even then, you could prepare, you knew how to get through it. (I was never in a tornado, although once I saw the green sky in the distance.)

The first time I felt an earthquake, shortly after moving to California as an adult in the seventies, I was shocked and scared. There’s no warning, unlike the big weather systems that you can see coming for hundreds of miles. Suddenly everything that had been solid and stable wasn’t. That first one lasted for only a few seconds, and nothing fell and broke at our house, but my relationship to the earth was never quite as trusting afterward.

@MrGrimm888….Boeing is here. That’s why we live here.

Ah, well, since you asked…

Santa Rosa, California back-to-back earthquakes, 10/1969. 5.7 and 5.9 on the Richter. I was in the hills around Sebastopol. It was just 10pm and I ran out of the house just in time to watch a huge redwood move laterally a few feet on our lawn and flower gardens which were rippling dirt like light chop on lake water. When it stopped we all went back inside to turn on the 10pm San Francisco news and they weren’t saying anything about it. Then it hit the studio and lights fell, desks rolled away from the newscasters, the camera panned to the cieling then to the floor then acrossed the faces of totally freaked out newscasters. It seemed like it took a couple of minutes to travel the 55 miles down the fault line to San Francisco. Then we got hit again and out we ran.

San Fernando (Sylmar) earthquake, 2/1971. Richter 6.7. I was looking down on the valley from a house on the side of Coldwater Canyon. We felt it bigtime, and watched as little mushroom clouds of white smoke would puff up as buildings went down here and there. The news bulletin was telling people to evacuate the whole San Fernando because they were afraid of a big earthen damn breaking and flooding the area. Luckily, that didn’t happen.

Lots of near misses with hurricanes, but we still sustained a lot of wind and water damage as they nicked us:

Betsy (1965) Cat 4. She was a bitch, throwing off a bunch of highly destructive tornadoes.

Eloise (1975) Cat 3. Sat right off the coast for 24 hours, gathering strength and beating the hell out of us. Major flooding, moderate wind damage.

Andrew (1992). Cat 5 plus. ‘Nuff said about that sonuvabitch.

Opal (1995) Cat 4, sat immediately off the coast for 15 hrs. Did a lot of damage and flooding. Tornadoes.

Charley (8/13/2004) 150mph at the center, nicked us. Wind and flood damage. Tornadoes.

Frances (9/5/2004) Cat 4. Slowly lumbered her way up the center of Florida, nicking us just 3 weeks after Charley.

Ivan (9/16/2004) Cat 5, finished what Charley and Frances started. Tornadoes.

Jeanne (9/26/2004) She was a Cat 4 when she hit the Keys, then rode the ridge up the center of Florida. Near miss, but some wind damage and major flooding due to she being the 5th hurricane hitting the area in as many weeks, only ten days after Ivan. 2004 was a bitch for Florida hurricanes.

Dennis (2005) Cat 4, zipped right past us. Pushed water into the bay, causing major coastal flooding. Tornadoes.

Emily (2005) Cat 5, She made her pass farther out in the Gulf, but came only days after
Dennis and exacerbated the flooding situation back to emergency proportions.

Katrina (2005) Cat 5 plus. Another Andrew. Just missed us. Pushed a little water in the bay before she zeroed in on New Orleans.

My family and I are extremely lucky that we’ve never taken a direct hit. The last time an eye passed over this county was in 1921 and before that, 1848. We must be least scathed of all the Florida counties.

I worked on a DMAT team in the aftermath of Andrew down in Cutler Ridge. The place looked like Hiroshima for as far as the eye could see.

I arrived in Port-au-Prince seven days after the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. Place was a mess. Open sewers, no potable water, no food being shipped into the city. Crush wound victims of all ages. We had to have the USMC to guard our medical supplies from the Touton Macout types.

Most homes in “tornado” alley have storm cellars. The only time i was ever really stressed was in the spring of 1961, when we saw two tornadoes in the same evening. My grandfather was in a wheelchair and i was just a kid. i had no idea who i would get him down into the cellar. Fortunately, they passed us by. They wiped out a little town to the west of us, though.

I’ve been 30 feet from a lightning strike; so close that my arm-hair stuck up from the static electricity nearby, and so close you could hear the sizzle of the air being superheated for a second. We were under a canopy at a local county park, and the lighting hit a tree about 15 steps away.

Tornado: closest ever was about one mile. Heard the train-locomotive sound from that distance, but fortunately it wasn’t coming my direction.

Oh, I almost forgot, back in July of 2010–2011 or thereabouts, a lightening strike during a huge summer T-storm hit a transformer and at the top of my rural front yard and rained down sparks all over my roof. It was crazy, I was sitting at the front window on my laptop when kaboom! and sparks were showering down around me. I thought my house got struck by lightening but it was the transformer. I even asked a question here about what just happened. haha

@Coloma Good one.

I also just remembered when visiting my parents house in Denver one year, my dad was in the hospital and Mom and I were alone when the worst hail storm EVER hit. There was a glass patio table out on the deck and it was reduced to shards in 10 minutes. I’m just glad I was there to help clean up.

@YARNLADY Wow, was it a hail storm?

Lemon sized hail pretty much destroyed the roof and siding on my last house a few years back. Been very close to a couple of lightning strikes.

That calls to mind my favorite obscure fact (not “factoid”). Blanding, Utah has no evidence of any natural disaster, ever. It’s a lousy place to live: no water, poor soil, no trees, no way to earn a living other than by catering to tourists on their way to Four Corners. It takes violence to make a place nice.

@Dutchess III. We have a Boeing place here too. Several members of my family work there.

@SmartAZ I love Utah! Utah is beautiful!
if I could afford to buy a ranch property near Bryce or Zion I’d be there in a heartbeat. Now here’s a spread that makes my heart swoon.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI1D9a0Z2-Y

Blanding looks like this: https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1024&bih=739&q=blanding%2C+utah&oq=blanding%2C+utah

Don’t be fooled by that dramatic picture of a river. That is a state park thirty miles away.

FWIW, I was born in Utah. A lot of people call me “Hey U.”

Well, one year, about 1989 or so, I had a day care. Youngest was about 6 months old. Tornado sirens went off and I herded everyone in the basement, but the baby needed a bottle. I ran upstairs to fix one. As I was working I looked out the window and saw the most God-awful sickly, dark green clouds heading towards us. I was so scared I was shaking too hard to finish the bottle and I left it and ran back down to the basement. Then the hail hit. The devastation was incredible. The west side of every almost every building and home looked like it had been hit by a bomb.
Ironically, before the storm hit, I had noticed that somebody had left their car across the street, in front of an industrial park that was across the street. Their windows were down. Being a good Samaritan, knowing that a storm was coming, I ran over and rolled their windows up….

That was one of two that have scared me. Usually it’s just, like, “What evs.” And for those who think we have no warning…we do. Not from the radio or TV, which is useless because they don’t sound the warnings until you’re in the middle of it, and it’s like, “Ya think??” but because you can feel it. You can just feel it.

The second time I was scared was about 9 years ago. Rick was out of town, about 80 miles away. I was on the back deck and glanced over and just froze….this horrible, dense, low hanging, coal black cloud cloud was racing my way. I ran into the house, grabbed my camera and pictures and flew down the cellar steps. I put them in a safe place, then went and sat at the top of the stairs. I didn’t really want to go down there unless I had to, but I was ready to just leap.
Shaking, I called Rick to tell him I thought I was about to be hit by a tornado…..
.......
He just chuckled condescendingly. He said, “I’m looking at the weather channel, and everything is fine there.”
I felt my blood rising.
I said, “I’m telling you I’m about to be hit by a tornado!”
He just laughed and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Nothing is happening there. ”
I could have spit blood. I slammed the phone down….well, not really because it was a cell phone, and that’s one thing that really sucks about cell phones~You can’t slam them down. >_<.

Just then “It” hit. It was like a gigantic elephant slamming into the house, over and over. I still didn’t make the leap into the basement, though (and it would have been a leap. To hell with the steps.) I was pretty well protected where I was, which was in a short, narrow hallway, in the middle of the house, between the kitchen and the dining room. It is only about 7 feet tall, too.
The phone rang. It was my husband. I picked it up, held it up for him to hear the noise, and then yelled, “FUCK YOU!!!“and slammed the phone down again. I was SO angry with him. He knew I’m not a foo foo girly, girl. I don’t make a big deal over nothing, I’m not a drama queen, I don’t panic easily…and I was panicking. I knew he could hear it in my voice the first time we talked.
The phone rang again, almost immediately. It was with grim satisfaction that I didn’t answer it. (I should have turned it off so it went directly to voice mail….ha ha! Didn’t think of that until just now.)
Then the power went out.
Oh. God….....................
Every fiber of my being was straining, listening, sensing, feeling…....
...................................................................................................
................................................................................................................
And then, just like that…..it was quiet. It was gone.

Shaking I made my way back into the main part of the house, which was eerily quiet and eerily intact.
Then the sirens went off. (Told you.)
The phone rang. I answered, calmly. It was my husband. He had panic in his voice. He said, ”The weather channel is saying multiple tornadoes in the town!!!!”
I said, “No, fucking shit but it’s gone now.” And hung up on him. I refused to answer the phone for the rest of the night.
Asshole.
About 3 weeks later we were visiting an acquaintance who owns a remodeling company. We had some questions about the house. Our acquaintance brought the storm up. He said, “Wasn’t that freaky? Just outta nowhere!”
I said, “Yeah, it was!”
Then I turned to stare at my husband, who had the decency to hang his head.

FWIW, that incident, and another, not long after that , caused him to never question my word again. He does learn.

I lived in a RV in my sister’s backyard for about a year. Conveniently about 10 meters from a power-pole with a transformer. One night I was asleep in the bed above the cab and boom. Lightning hit the transformer. It was incredibly loud and when I woke up all I could see is orange and the RV was shaking. It was terrifying.

I moved a few months later.

Oh. I also saw this tornado, but we had to chase it down or I wouldn’t have seen it. It’s the only tornado I’ve ever seen. It was incredible. It was beautiful. Rick has seen lots of them. As we were racing towards clouds that were clearly rotating he suddenly slammed on his brakes, stopped and said, “Here it comes.” Just a mile or so away the clouds went from rotating widly to spinning tighter and tighter and tighter…and suddenly that beautiful tornado just slipped out of the middle of the vortex.
Here is a video someone took.

Having spent my entire life on the prairie I’ve seen more hail, severe storms and tornadoes than you could count. I’ve had a couple near-misses with lightning, including one so close I could feel the electricity tingle through my body. And a couple of blizzards bad enough to keep us effectively shut in for a few days (thankfully no loss of power). Also growing up in a region with at least a couple of active fault zones I’ve been though several earthquakes. None severe, although the New Madrid Fault is supposedly due for “the big one” (the quakes of 1811–12 were a pretty significant natural event in our country’s early history).

Well, that jogs my memory: I got flooded by a rainstorm 80 miles away.

My wife called me at work and said the rain was pretty bad and they were evacuating the apartments. I said “WTF?” It was not raining on my side of town. It turns out that the rain was at Roosevelt Lake, about 80 miles from Phoenix. When the lake reached its limits they had to open the valves and release water into the canal system. That water flowed 80 miles until it found a low place, jumped the bank, wiped out a half block of back fences, flowed down an alley, and jogged into my apartment. Fortunately we had moved all the soft goods off the floor, so the only cleanup was to dry the carpet and vacuum the mud out of the swimming pool.

Lesson learned: When your wife calls with some wacko story, assume it is at least partially true, even if she is normally wacko.

Lesson learned: When buying land in the desert, the most important factor is flood insurance.

Some of your answers made me think of some close brushes with weather, et.al.
-
Two bad snow blizzards. 1977 saw and hit the snow bank when snow lightening and thunder hit. The lightening fork split- one side light pink (bubble gum hue) and the other- light green (lime sherbet). Loud thunder. Snowed harder.
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The second was in an otherworldly blizzard- out driving. Hilly area of grass lands. 1990’s. Deep snow, “plowed” country road- yet light ice, thick dense fog swirling in odd wind patterns. Did not see the lightening, but snow thunder was loud. Reason for the odd wind moving the fog? A winter tornado was dancing around due to changing conditions and was about seven miles away. No ‘locomotive sounds’ while in snow. We had no idea.
-
Ice storm so horrible that it took over four hours on Interstate to get home in a usual 20 minute drive. I had to get out to scrape thick ice off windshield and wipers to keep going- while still on the freeway. (Barely off on the berm dodging Semis.) Friends who ” waited it out until it let up ” where stuck at school until the afternoon of the next day. Then it snows. Out for two weeks before X-mas. It was excellent! No pay for those days- but the freedom was so sweet at that time!
-
For one earthquake in OH – parent sitting on one side of the room – two kids on the other- only parent felt it and hopped up. I was too busy driving one elder sibling crazy. Felt nothing.
A trend-
Visiting San Fransisco, pretty sizable shake up- I was in shower. Again- felt nothing. While friend was catching his falling television, shelves, pots and pans, etc.
Same Vacay- Disneyland made everyone go out into the Main Street because of aftershocks. Did not feel it as we were on Space Mountain at the time. (shrug)
-
Cat in windowsill of one apt. Window in bathtub wall. Bad thunderstorm – but changing and it felt odd. I decided to get the cat out and shut the window. When I stepped into the old metal tub (yep) the hair on my head and arms stood straight up. The cats’ fur stood out. There wasn’t any air to breathe. I split second threw us both out of the tub- as the lightening struck a double-hit on the old – yet still grounded, outdoor tv antenna right above the window on the roof. It smoked from the hit. I got a black eye from the corner of the sink. The cat semi-deflated herself as she tore off for anywhere else but there- her dignity in tact.
-
In one house I rented, I had plants out on the covered porch half-walls along the front. It was raining kinda hard, not really dangerous lightening. I went out to put the plants on the floor of the porch because of the crazy winds that picked up. I was almost finished when a really strong pressure hit- literally pushing everything downwards. Even under the porch roof, I was pressured down to the floor. Planters, pots, all fell – even those already on the floor. Branches from the close-surrounding trees cracked and bows broke, even the older heavier, sturdy branches. It lasted a couple minutes. I crawled over and tried to open the screen door- no luck. All of a sudden- nothing. No rain, no wind, no thunder, just a loud low growl-type of sound. Suspended- almost timeless. The storm then continued raining, hard-with no lightening or thunder. All nearby was a mess.
The next day the weather people said that a roll of air was going along the ground and had started to join the wind back-draft off of the backside of one of the storm clouds. The whole process hit the huge valley near by, and when rolling uphill while coming off from the valley, the two were trying their damndest to get a funnel cloud going vertically. Pretty much overtop of this house/street! It pulled some trees up and took them away about a block or two over- but was not categorized as an “active” tornado by the doplar radar. (my butt it wasn’t!)
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Hurricanes- only the spiral arm storms and tornadoes after they hit land from Eastern Seaboard. The winds bringing them always blows backwards- the wrong direction.
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One response saying they cannot understand why people live near tornado-prone areas. You are not the first to say this. To us, we wonder why people would live near gigantic fault lines that threaten to cause the West Coast to fall off into the ocean. ( or if Kim Jong-un gets his rockets to fly in a straight- not curly pattern over to the San Andreas- wait- ah, forget it, not to worry…) Or the other areas with their uncontrollable land or weather conditions. I guess, wherever you are- you just don’t really think about it.
Too Much.
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(One aside- a friend’s Aunt lived in a one-traffic light town in SW OH. Tornadoes destroyed the row of houses next to her house and on down the street. They were gone- only the foundations left where they should be. Her Aunt? Some splinters in the bricks on that side of her house, but a plant sitting on the picnic table out in the back yard? Perfectly fine. Go figure.)

Thanks for your answers.

One year my son and I were on our way home from South Lake Tahoe in February when a snow storm struck. I had to call his school to say we were stuck in Lake Tahoe and he would miss class that day. We spent the evening sitting in the motel’s covered hot tub watching the snow come down. The next day was bright and sunny and we drove home with no problem.

1996 we had such a snowstorm, on the heels of several smaller ones and sub-freezing temps that kept the snow from melting, that the city was shut down to non-essential vehicles for a day to let the snow-clearing catch up.
We got out cross-country skis and went from Wall St area to midtown and back.

Oh, I forgot, again, about the snowstorm in 2010 that snowed me in for several days, lost power for 3 days and I had an electric starter on my heating system, sooo, I huddled up with the cats under about 7 blankets and read by lamplight like Abe Lincoln. It was crazy! I went outside at 5 a.m. and all you could hear were tree limbs snapping all around you all around you. About 2 feet of heavy, wet snow that took down tree limbs and power lines everywhere, then froze over and made driving up and down the hills in my neighborhood impossible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4u22GJdYo0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeB-e3yBIho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wuGu1yPa0

This was about 7 miles from me. Quakes here go up and down, so they can appear to be quite dramatic without causing major damage. I felt the first tremors and was not worried, but they kept getting stronger so I thought maybe I should get out of the house, you know, because I would feel awfully stupid if the house collapsed and I was still in it. By the time I got to the door, dishes were rattling in the cupboards. Outside the car was bouncing in the driveway. It is, um, a bit of a thrill to see a Mercedes Benz station wagon bouncing. After it was over I noticed that it did in fact crack the foundation, and at least one house in Mexico collapsed.

@Darth_Algar Are you writing your memoirs?

Little Darth On The Prairie. lol

@SmartAZ – I watched the videos. Wow. There was also another video right after that also showed various places inside- like businesses, etc. of the same earthquake. The shots of the different parts of a hotel- several floors, the lobby, restaurant etc., and then what the water in the swimming pool did as it shifted! I’ve never seen that before. :/ I feel bad for the little kids being upset and the pets running to escape it all. Thank you. Please be extra careful and go out side faster! Yikes!

@MrGrimm888

That’s a great story about your encounter with Hugo.

What was Hugo’s wind speed when it hit your hood?

@msh Shucks, when you live in an area that has a few dozen to a few hundred quakes every week, you just have to act cool. You can’t drop what you’re doing every time you think the house might fall down. You would never get anything done.

California has three cities that claim to be “earthquake capitol of the world” and all three can prove it.

I’ve got loved ones in two of them. Question- have you heard or been advised to run water in the bathtub in case of water main breaks? I know they have bottled water in their supplies, and he lives smack in the heart of ‘Shaky Town’. Is this legit? Have you heard that?

The town I live in has a water problem at least once a year. The water might be black, brown, or PINK without warning, and there might be a letter stuck to the gate warning to boil water because they are going to work on one of the pipes. That happened last month. I keep several two gallon jugs so I can flush the toilet when I get surprised, and five gallons of filtered water so I and the cats can always have a drink.

I have had well water on many properties over the years and yes, stock piling water and filling the tub for toilet flushing purposes during power outages is common practice for us rural dwellers.

We had an artesian well by the back door, which brought water to within 15 feet of the surface—we had a simple pump to bring it the rest of the way. We used city water to bathe, do dishes and laundry, but we always drank the well water.

2 September 2016:

There’s one right now, Hurricane Matthew, just east of me. Nasty bugger, but he decided to forego the small beer of the Leeward Islands and head for bigger game in Cuba and Haiti. During Matt’s period as just another a tropical storm spat at us from equatorial Africa, he passed over us into the warm waters of the Caribbean and blew up into Monster Matt, a Cat 4–5, with top winds of 150mph (242kph).

I’ve been experiencing a lot of rain for the past two weeks with steady 12kt winds from the E and ESE, with 20–24kt gusts. Nothing threatening. And the threat is now over for us in the East Caribbean, for the time being, but this time of year tropical storms roll off the African coast like trucks off a Detroit assembly line, each one a potential hurricane aimed right at us. That’s why they call this Hurricane Alley.

He should shoot safely between Jamaica and Puerto Rico and be over the Windward Passage by 8am Tuesday. At this point, the easternmost tip of Cuba, including Guantanamo, and poor Haiti will get the worst of it. Then he will pass over the Bahamas and into the Atlantic, build strength and may become a threat to the east coast of the U.S by 8pm, Friday. Good luck, guys.

Edit: just West of me. Bloody hell, I do believe I’m rapidly becoming qualified to run for president.

LOLL!! I’m so directionally dysfunctional I should recieve disability from the state! Sometimes I even screw up my left and right.

Today we got the first rain drops in 5 long months. The rain had mostly stopped when we were unloading the groceries, but suddenly a very long, loud clap of thunder hit us. It was nice, but the rain barely landed on the ground and dried up again.

After 56 years on this earth I think I have seen or been closely related to most natural disasters this world has to offer. I have had lightning strike very near (within 100 yds) to me several times. My wife was twice in a car that got struck by lightning. I have had tornadoes hit nearby towns. I lived in NE Ohio for years and have survived blizzards. Ice storms that knocked out power for 5 days. My ex-wife and children were in Napa when the big earthquake hit SF in 1989. They were fine, thanks for asking. My current wife and I are now living in the coastal Carolinas and have had to learn to adapt to hurricanes. So far we have been lucky. Irene turned into a tropical storm before it hit us, Arthur missed us and hit north of us, Sandy stayed offshore so we didn’t get much from her and most recently Matthew visited, but the eye went almost directly overhead so we got some wind, but not a ton of rain. I have been through hail and torrential downpours. I have seen many water spouts. I have been through droughts and had the concerns of forest fires coming to visit. Thankfully I have managed to avoid major flooding. But I have found that everywhere I have lived has something that people have to worry about from a weather perspective. I think as you live in an area you accept these challenges and arrange things for your best chances of survival with style.

On Thursday we got the winds from hell. Tore all kinds of stuff up. Trees went down on power lines, tree limbs down every where. We were without power for about 20 hours.
Ha ha. A neighbor across the street had a giant limb that went down. It completely, totally blocked the street between us.
After things had calmed down Rick and I went for a drive. On the way home we came up our street and Rick said, “Man! Look! It’s clear! They cleared that branch up alread….SUMBITCHES THREW IT IN OUR YARD!!!”
City sumbitches always throw stuff in our yard! They set a portapotty in our yard for two weeks when they were resurfacing the street.

Yesterday we went to visit some friends who live in the country. They spend the day cleaning, with a tracker and a high loader. His friend said the trees didn’t snap. They were twisted off!! That’s some wind, boy.

We didn’t get much rain with that storm. It saved up up for last night. BIG storm again last night. But it’s nice and cool today.