Was it earthquake, tsunami, tornado, storm, flood, or?
I experienced the edges of hurricanes every summer as a kid. You just deal with it.
Flooding, power outages, etc.
Does Ice Storm '98 count? As a kid, it was super wild to wake up to our house being ~10C then realizing that the heat wasn’t gonna be turning back on for a loooooong time.
Fortunately our neighbor had a gas stove in his basement and invited a bunch of folks from the neighborhood to use his house as a shelter for a while. It was super fun playing outdoors in the ice though. Literally everything was covered with inches of ice. You could put on a pair of skates and go anywhere you wanted for a couple days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ice_storm
Mine would be back in 2011, Tohoku Earthquake. Despite being pretty far from the epicentre, the earthquake is to this day the strongest I have felt…
Same here. Was walking out of a friend’s apartment complex in Asakasa Tokyo where I was staying in when it hit. Heard this low rumbling that came from all directions and the birds were going nuts. Looked up and saw the high rise I just walked from swaying while the glass facade of another building was undulating. Never been in an earthquake before so I was more amused about the shaking ground than frightened. And it didn’t help that every single Japanese was very calm, so I thought it was no big deal until much later when the tsunami hit.
Earthquakes have to be one of the weirdest natural disasters. I’ve only been in a ‘tiny’ 5.4 magnitude (+countless aftershocks) and it was an experience I will never forget - so surreal. I understood that the ground moved in an earthquake before, but there is a different level of understanding when you’ve felt the earth betray you en masse like that.
I’ve also been in a couple of tornados, which were also scary af, but in a more normal sort of way. They are amazingly loud and the sandpaper wind is so much more painful than I would have expected.
Interesting— growing up in California, I feel differently. I’ve never seen a tornado before but I think I’d be way more spooked by that than an earthquake. But I’ve been through plenty of earthquakes, including in the middle of the night when they woke me up, so they don’t really phase me. The only scary thing is that, unlike weather, you don’t know they’re coming. But they’re also over pretty quick (usually).
- you have experienced: you experienced something
- you have BEEN experienced: something experienced you
Compare: dropped. “You have dropped it” vs “you have been dropped”
or?
You’ve left words out.
im not a native speaker man, give me a break
He respectfully taught you how to improve, you ought to say thank you.
Lol, relax Francis.
Your English is excellent for a non-native speaker, probably as good as the average native speaker (frankly that’s a criticism of the average speaker as much a compliment to you).
I can see how you made this mistake, it’s pretty easy to make as you’re thinking of the question, you kind of combined 2 ways of asking it.
“Have you ever been in a natural disaster”
“Have you ever experienced a natural disaster”
Several tornados and multiple hurricanes.
Same. Florida’s worst disasters are usually just the people.
I was in the Tohoku earthquake in Japan in 2011, in Fukushima, relatively close to the epicenter and the nuclear power plant.
It was an ordeal, to say the least. We were completely cut off for eight days.
I’m sorry you had to endure that. I remember watching it happen and knew the scale of the devastation made it even worse than what the media portrayed it as.
I’m happy you were able to get out.
Thank you.
Not a disaster but I was on vacation in Cancun during the summer about a decade ago and a small hurricane went through headed north. That’s pretty routine there and it was relatively mild, though my flight was delayed 24h.
When I got home, which was north TX at the time, that night the same storm went over me again. Though at that point it had reduced significantly to just a thunderstorm.
Then early that morning I got in my car and headed north to IL where my cousin was getting married. As I was crossing into Missouri, I went through a heavy rainstorm and I realized it was the same storm from before. It was pretty neat to experience it in different parts of the continent over 48 hours.
Experienced a river flooding due to excessive rainfall. Both on a small scale on a camping where some tents floated away, which was kind of funny because the owners had warned not to pitch the tents to close to the river.
More recently witnessed a large scale flooding last winter when large parts of the rhine flooded. There were no casualties in my region, but the damage was quite severe. Very sobering to see the death toll in the upstream regions. Also the impact to agriculture and infrastructure, with frequent rain keeping the ground fully saturated for months al the way up to summer.
Water is so vital for human civilization, and yet also very dangerous.
A few hurricanes and the Texas snow storm
Lol! I was just thinking to myself, “Huh, I guess not” and then I remembered I lived in Fort Worth for a few years and one year it snowed barely even two inches. The city shut down for a week and the roads were littered with debris from car wrecks. Having grown up in the northern Midwest, I was quite amused.
Hurricane in Florida in the 80s, but I was far enough inland to not be in danger. The eye of the storm is really spooky. Complete and utter silence.
Also the 1991 snowstorm in Duluth MN. Started snowing on Halloween and didn’t stop for three days. We had four feet of snow in the yard.
That was a lot of fun, the town was paralyzed for a couple of days until the plows started to get things in order.
Volcano
I was in Houston for Hurricane Harvey. We didn’t get flooded, but the whole city was paralyzed for two weeks. And that was just to get basic transportation functioning again. I was teaching undergraduate students at the time, and my class was just cancelled for two weeks in the fall term. We just missed two semesters of the fall term with no makeup.
My home didn’t get flooded, but many of my students and colleagues did experience flooding. We did however have a leak open up in the back wall of our townhome. We had a leak that allowed water in the back wall, which resulted in water damage in two rooms. I filed a claim with insurance, but they lowballed us, and after the hurricane, contractors only wanted to work on big projects, whole house gutting and repair. So I actually did the repairs myself. I figured I could either use the insurance payment to cover 1/3 of the repair cost, or I could use the insurance payment to buy the tools I needed to do it myself. I first built an access scaffolding behind the unit to fix the leak. Afterwards on the inside I tore out a bunch of drywall and repaired the interior damage.
Oh well, it put me down the path I’m on now. I eventually got really into woodworking, starting with the tools I had bought to do that repair. And further down the road, that put me on the path to pursuing a PhD in wood science. So what a tangled web we weave, I suppose…
Had a tornado go by 1/4 mile from our house once. It was dark so we didn’t really realize how close it was at the time. My dad and I were on the front porch when the sirens went off and were like “yea, whatever” because those things go off just about every time we have a storm in spring. Then we felt the air pressure drop and were like “Oh, shit, maybe we should go inside”. The next day we drove by where it went through and saw all the debris everywhere. Fortunately it was mostly empty field and didn’t hit any houses.
What does it feel like when the air pressure drops?
To me at least, it feels like the air got heavier (even though it’s really getting lighter). That could be followed by your ears popping. Some people like me get joint pain. My wife gets migraines right away with big pressure drops. Atmospheric pressure is a weird thing.
It went from feeling normal to feeling like there was less air around instantly. Like it was slightly harder to breathe and just feels lighter. It’s hard to explain. The closest thing I’d compare it to was going to someplace that’s a high altitude but it was an instant drop instead of changing as you go up.
When I lived in San Jose as a kid, I experienced several earthquakes. Including the really big one that hit San Francisco in 1989. I remember it hitting while I was walking home from a friend’s house and it was strong enough to keep knocking me down.
This is mine too. I was six and lived in San Jose also. I don’t remember the earthquake itself but I have very vivid memories of the rest of the day, talking to neighbors, cooking dinner with the propane camp stove, candles, and hazy TV after midnight when the power finally came back on.
Loma Prieta gang rise up! I was in Los Gatos swinging across a set of monkey bars on a playground. I remember being able to see literal waves in the ground.
