The most I've been affected is losing some shingles off the roof, the flood waters coming half-way up my yard (but not in the house) and no electricity for a week. The no electricity thing wasn't bad at all. We slept on the couch without blankets and read all day. We had three hurricanes hit us this year. I think we lost the trees with Hurricane Frances.

Also the fires of 1998. I can remember working on the tenth floor of the hospital and the floor was thick with smoke. It was bad for some people, but I can't complain. I did not lose anything.

I haven't been affected at all. After hearing NPR report the China earthquake and last night's Boy Scout camp tragedy, among other natural disasters, I feel very fortunate and grateful.

I was working in a deli about 3/4 of a mile from one of the firelines of the Oakland Hills fire. We were trying to close up and get the hell out as gawkers were coming in to order sandiwiches so they'd have something to eat while watching people's houses burn. It was weird. My apartment at the time was a little bit further off, but I remember going up on the roof that night a couple of times to check where the nearest fireline was.

Also, we lost power for about three days in this windstorm. I was sitting at this very desk when a large maple blew over and clipped our house, missing me by about ten feet.

I posted this when the Universal Studios fire smoked-up my former neighborhood. Now the big wildfire in Monterrey County is affecting the air quality of parts of SLO. I'm farther south so the smoke hasn't hit me - yet - but I can see the smoke from here and this fire is far from contained or controlled.

I was in Charlotte, NC, when Hurricane Hugo hit. I was at my parents' house, in the middle of the woods, when it hit, at 4 am. 7 trees on the roof, many, many more down all over the place, and it all happened in the dark, trees crashing down all around us, big trees, and no idea when the next one would fall.

Coming out in the morning was like, not so much a nightmare, but like Dorothy first seeing Munchkin land--everything was just topsy-turvy. Sure, we're all used to seeing the forest floor covered with leaves, but all the leaves were green, since thy'd just been blown off the trees. And there were trees down everywhere--Charlotte lost 1/3 of its trees, and we were in the woods, so there were literally hundreds of trees down, completely covering the road, our only exit. It took us hours just to get out of our neighborhood, and that was possible only because we lived next to a firefighter who cut firewood as a side business. His family all came over with saws and ladders and such and really saved our bacon.

The house was without power for 10 days. My parents' house was completely electric, including the well, so they didn't have water, or toilets, for a week and a half. It was horrible.

The Blizzard of 1996 comes to mind. I had my first customer in the deli in my supermarket at 7 am (just as soon as we unlocked the door). They lined up, everyone actually cooperating with one another, each person ordering pounds, and pounds of lunch meat and cheeses. My help called out, and I had people 15 to 20 deep at the counter. We closed the store early, around 2 or 3 in the afternoon - by then the only customers coming in were driving SUVs. I had a car with no heat at that time, and the snow was already over a half a foot deep. Driving home was nervewracking; I'm just glad most people were off the road by then. The governor closed the state the next day. It took hours to dig our cars out. At least we didn't lose power that time.

There's been 'Noreasters, a hurricane here and there, and flooding, but I've been lucky enough not to have suffered anything serious.

I guess I forgot Hurricane Fran, when I'd just moved to NC. Even so, the worst thing that happened to me personally was a small leak in my apartment roof. The UNC campus lost 1/3 of its old growth trees, and the root beds were about as tall as a one-story building.

And then several years later we had a bad ice storm where most people lost power for two weeks. Mine was off for 8 hours. Many people were taking showers at my house.


Like I said, I'm lucky. (Knock wood!)

This was madness.

I don't know the flickr poster.

Then we had Gaston.

Also wind events and tornados. But we, ourselves, here at the homestead, have been lucky.

I will say that when we woke five days after Isabel, to a sound like an airplaine or a train, we did what we wern't supposed to do - Immediately run to the windows and press our noses and hands against them to see what the heck was going on.

So yeah, we were lucky. And if I ever hear that sound again, I'll know to take cover.

Instinct is strong. You can't know what to do until you've been through it, and if luck isn't in your corner on that day. . .dag.

Oh, and Stewie, we even had a day last week where we had haze and smell from the NC wildfire! Not an immediate threat, but wierd.

Still and all, I think, statistic-wise, we've had more than our share of extreme weather here in Central VA, and I'm not really worried about a repeat for another 20 years, pending teh global warming, etc.

rainbaby, I'm almost 200 miles from the fire itself, so I'm not at all surprised you'd have experienced the haze. I think people from this general SE US are rather accustomed to the typical (i.e. not horrific) hurricane, but fires are far from the norm. Also, can you imagine if we had an earthquake? That would be extremely weird. I don't think I'd know what it was.

I've only been on the cusp of bigger disasters.

- During the 1993 wildfires in Laguna Beach, where I was going to school at the time, my dad came and picked up a few of my friends and I and we didn't get to go back to school for 9 days. About 20% of my classmates lost a house.

- We lost some plates and glasses in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Various other earthquakes haven't really caused too much damage, though.

- The summer 2005 tsunami on the south coast of Java swept through a little beach village I'd been through at Easter, wrecking the area's subsistence fishing fleet and tourism industry, a pretty huge loss. My colleagues and I raised a few hundred dollars to get things for the community like tarps and other supplies, and a friend drove them down to the area. (If you're familiar with the south coast of Java, the village is called Batu Keras, and is well known in surfing circles for a great point break - here's an article talking about the village and the impact of the disaster there.)

- The tsunami was not caused by the earthquake a few months earlier, which damaged large parts of the Yogyakarta region, home to my boss' wife's entire family, and killed nearly 6000 people. Luckily everyone in their family was OK.

- The fall 2007 wildfires came within a half a mile of my mom's office, and my brother's high school hosted evacuees and Governor Schwarzeneggar.

All that said, my time in Indonesia made it pretty clear that of everyone affected by disasters, people of modest/limited means (without access to banks, insurance, or other kinds of protection) can see their whole life's work just evaporate. I'm amazed, really, that I've been a witness to so much destruction but that I'm still OK.

Oooh! Stewrifric, we had a little earthquake, not the Tori kind, thank goodness, within the last five years too. We thought it was like a gas main explosion a little bit away. I think it was about a year after Isabel. "Oh my" said my boss at the time. I said, "we need to go outside." It was nothing, but again, untill you experience it, you have no idea what the heck it is!

I lived in Thousand Oaks, CA during the wildfires in 1993. One of them got to within a couple miles of where my mum and I were living. I was getting close to rounding up the cats and photo albums when we were told that it turned from our direction.

Mum and I also just missed the 1994 Northridge earthquake. We had just moved to Texas* that January about three weeks before the quake. My brother and his family still lived in T.O. and they had some significant damage to the apartment they were living in. I had been working in an office in Van Nuys (next to the airport) and it was totaled.

*We worked for the same S&L and were both transferred to the Houston area.