I drove through an f3 tornado without realizing it was a tornado.
Was headed home after work one night and my girlfriend at the time wanted taco bell so when I finally headed home I was met with a wall of rain that immediately blinded me. I pulled off the road into a clearing and as soon as I did a lightning bolt hit the telephone pole next to me.
Needless to say I floored it and moved a decent distance from the pole which was now on fire. I waited for the rain to clear a bit and decided it was time to drive home.
Bad idea.
Next thing I know I’m literally dodging falling trees left and right with the wind almost forcing me off the road. I eventually made it home but not until having to turn around multiple times due to trees blocking roads and having to drive over downed power lines that I didn’t know were there until I was already driving on them.
3/10 wouldn’t recommend.
The sad part is I recently drove through another tornado and I thought it would never happen again 😭
I am sorry but this is too funny. “If I have a dollar for every time I accidentally drive into a tornado I’d have $2. Which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”
definitely the Tubbs Fire. You can see where my childhood home used to be in the wikipedia image! Fortunately, we didn’t live there at the time, we were a couple neighborhoods over, but it was still quite scary, the air was horrible, it lasted forever, and we had to evacuate for a while to my grandma’s house to the south. Fortunately the worst of the damage to our home was holes melted in the fake grass from raining embers, and a persistent smell of smoke, and nobody i knew got hurt.
someday, i want to live somewhere that doesn’t have to worry about ‘fire season’.
I’ve been in earthquakes, hurricanes, and a couple blizzards and ice storms. The worst were the tornados. I would rather put up with the first four combined than be anywhere near an F-4 or F-5 ever again.
I’ve seen the aftermath of various larger ones,but that is kind of my job,so it doesn’t count.
And I got married on the day on the day my wife’s hometown was hit by the Central European summer floods. We didn’t notice much, though,thanks to fabulous staff at the venue.
I experienced a few local ones, though - an avalanche, a thunderstorm in the alps that had torrential gusts of 180km/h and killed a few people (and we were in a very exposed spot-that was fucking scary) - one person died a mere 800m away from us (but we didn’t know and would not have any means to get there in time anyway, as it was 600m vertical rock between us and he died on the spot).
Hurricane Katrina. We were on the outskirts of the storm and were inundated with evacuees. The city was closed for a curfew. Got stuck driving far from home to sleep at a friend’s house. Spent the next 3 days cutting trees and cleaning debris at all of our family and friends houses. No power. Hottt. Wake me up when September Dnds was real to us.
Have been through hurricanes, but the most severe natural disaster I’ve been in was a flood around 1980, it rained steadily, not so hard but without stopping, for over 2 weeks and the storm drain system just slowly got overwhelmed and the streets started filling up, my mom’s house was pretty far above street level and far from the river and the bay but still got flooded, people were getting out on boats in what had been streets but now were streams. I was young and remember getting out but don’t remember how we returned.
2010 chilean Earthquake and tsunami (8.8), and the 2016-17 forest fires too
Chile has an extreme propensity to natural disasters, but Chileans have learn to deal with them so they aren’t that bad, like after the 2010 8.8 quake there was an 8.5 or so in 2015 that caused little damage because lessons were learned, consider that quakes over 6.0 happens every year or two in chile, also we have floods, forest fires? Volcanoes, landslide, etc.
My grandma felt the 9.5 Valdivia quake (biggest earthquake recorded in world history) and shortly after started working in the ministry of infrastructure, she always says she had to type “devastated area” a lot lol, my mom also felt her fair share of quakes too, and my parents were just away from Santiago (the city where we live) when a enormous flood hit here and caused a ton of damage, and we’re not talking about the natural disasters that happened in other areas of the county, like more quakes, floods, forest fires and volcanoes…
Yeah, if you want to safely-ish experience natural disasters, come live in chile! Lmao.
God damn. You make Chileans sound like the Fremen. Living in the most inhospitable planet in the galaxy and it hones them into a deadly society of warriors.
In the grand scheme of disasters, I didn’t get this too bad, but hurican Ida.
I live in an area with a lot of rivers and streams and we experienced some historic flooding for our area to the point that it took us a few days or weeks to even know exactly how high the water got because the river gauges went completely under water, the old records were totally shattered.
My house was at a high enough elevation that I didn’t have an immediate flood danger to my house, but we did loose power for about 16 hours, which meant I did need to go bail out my basement sump pump every so often because the pump wasn’t running without power. People who were closer to the rivers of course got it worse, some people had to be evacuated from their homes by boat, lots of flood damage to go around, a handful of homes practically got washed away completely. There was some concern about certain dams potentially being overwhelmed but thankfully nothing much came of that.
I work in my county’s 911 center, and of course they paged out for anyone available to come in to do so. I tried, couldn’t make it more than a mile or so in any direction without hitting flooding and that was the before the worst of the flooding. Some roads and bridges were really fucked up from the flooding.
Luckily I have some friends nearby with a generator so we ran our perishables over to them to throw in their fridge. Those friends get their water from a well, and their generator doesn’t have enough juice to run the well pump with their fridge and stuff, so we bartered some potable water and cold showers with them in exchange.
They pulled up the stats at work for how many storm related calls we had, water rescues, electrical fires, downed trees, flooding, etc. I don’t remember the numbers, it’s been a few years but they we insane.
The August 2020 derecho that tore up a lot of the US Midwest. I lost power for 4 days, there was extremely hot weather, and I had a menial labor job at that time. it was hell
It wasn’t just the Midwest. I lived in West Virginia (in a city) and I had no power for seven days. And yeah holy shit it was 100 degrees every day and maximum humidity. 300 year old trees were scattered around like nothing.
Perth hailstorm of 2011. Every car was pockmarked for about a decade after, and some lawn chairs fell over. In the grand scheme of things, not that big
Central Virginia reason, so Hurricane Isabel, I think we lost power for like a week had a bunch of trees down. Hurricane Gaston, wasn’t as severe I don’t remember a lot of wind or power going out but it just dumped a ton of rain on the region b/c like it just move so slowly over the region. And then I just remember a hand full of snow storms that closed school for awhile, and I think like a really bad ice storm where we lost power for like a week or two. But Isabel by far the worst.