Ask Lemmy

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.

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

thunder, i guess

Several tornados and multiple hurricanes.

Yup, Helene, a few months ago, in Asheville NC.

You could say I'm still experiencing it, I suppose. We've always been a place that's too far inland for a hurricane. Very climate insulated. That bubble has burst for us here after this storm.

It was super scary, no cell service for days, no power or water or gas for days. We have a great network of people so we were supported and supporting but it went bad for many others.

But more than scary right now, it's sad. Just seeing the devastation

Live in Australia, so lotta fire, and been in Brisbane for a while now, and it's gone underwater a good few times during my time here, large floods are not very fun!

I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We really don't get natural disasters here.

The closest we get in Halifax is a Cat 3 hurricane once every 3 or 4 years, multiple blizzards each winter, we get light freezing rain once a year and a significant amount about every 10 years.

We lose power for a few hours many times per year because our power company is privately owned and has to answer to shareholders.

I once went without power for 3 days.

Could be a lot worse.

I was in Christchurch for the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes that killed 185 people and critically damaged essentially every building within the city centre.

The whole thing was pretty surreal. My family were pretty lucky, our house was lightly damaged (old timber frame, moved ~2cm off its piles but was livable while that was fixed) and we had a few things break (including a 60L fishtank that nearly landed on me as I tried to get to a doorway), I know a few people who were without electricity and clean water for a week, or whose houses were damaged beyond repair then had to spend years fighting insurance companies to get what they were due.

I still live in the city, and it's pretty much unrecognisable as to how it was before. Basically every major building in the central city had to either be torn down or significantly renovated to repair it. Basically every brick building built before the 1950s was damaged beyond repair. Huge chunks of residential land in the east of the city was so badly damaged that there is no way it could be safely built on again - the government brought all the houses, tore them down and fenced the area off.

I was 183 miles from Mount Saint Helens when it blew up in 1980. We still had half an inch of ash. The volcano was on a Sunday, school was cancelled on Monday. We had to wear dust masks to go outside.

When we got closer to the mountain, everything smelled like rotten eggs (sulfur). Even weeks later.

https://youtu.be/SFHfXalElJw

Tornados wreck my town every year. In short, it sucks.

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.

I was 15 during the 1998 ice storm.

It's obviously not as dangerous as a tornado or an earthquake or a flood, but it's still a natural disaster, and disrupted society in the region for weeks and months.

At first it was difficult to realize the size of the catastrophe but then millions went without power, the infrastructure crumbled under the ice and roads became impracticable. The magnitude of the disaster became apparent when the army had to come and help.

Luckily I lived in a rural area at the time and we relied on a wood furnace for heat and hot water. We also shared a generator with other family members so I had power a few hours a day. Compared to people without heat water, food or electricity, it went ok for my family.

It took about 10 days for my region to have power back, while others had to wait for up to 30 days.

This left its mark on me and now I try to be prepared, have batteries charged, solar panels, water reserves, food for a few days, a camping stove, ways to keep warm, etc., just in case.

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...

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.

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...

The one recently in Vermont.

Not me, but my aunt and cousins were on holiday in Sri Lanka in 2004 when the tsunami hit. They managed to get to a higher elevation in time, but lost most of their stuff, including passports, as the place they were staying at was basically washed away.

Magnitude 6.7 earthquake. Woke up to it shaking my bed violently in my dorm room. (Boarding school) Thankfully, I didn't have anything above me that could fall, but some of the other students kept books in the shelves above their beds. Suffice it to say they got an even ruder awakening than I did...

There was a big aftershock a few minutes later -- just after I'd gotten the hell out of the building, basically -- and smaller aftershocks for days afterwards.

It put a big crack in the floor of my dorm and everyone who lived there had to stay outside all day until the administration declared it safe for us to re-enter.

That was coincidentally the same day as a school festival and I'd spent the evening before working with my classmates converting the art room into a haunted house. I never got to see the mess, but whatever happened in there was so bad the room was unusable for months. Most of the rest of the festival (e.g. outdoor stalls and such) was still able to be run though, so they carried on with the parts they could. It was surreal.

Took a direct hit from Hurricane Ivan. Blew all our roofing off so the rain was blowing in and big chunks of ceiling were falling in while we were all huddled in the hallway. We found the roof of our back porch in the middle of the street, about 4 houses down. We've ridden out a lot of hurricanes over the decades, but Ivan was the scariest.

In the end we came out of it smelling like a rose. My wife's parents had both recently passed, and we were planning on buying their house out of their estate. I was in the middle of readying our house for sale when the storm hit. Our house got wrecked, while the parents house was left pretty much unhurt, aside from a few missing shingles and a downed tree. We moved in immediately and ended up selling our house as-is to the "we buy ugly houses" people for about half it's normal value, collected a fat insurance check from Liberty Mutual, which combined with the sale was enough to pay off the mortgage and pocket a few grand, which was right at what we hoped to sell it for because we didn't have very much equity in it at the time. We ended up right where we planned on being, much sooner than we thought we would. We got lucky for sure...

I’ve experienced a handful of very near tornados, lots of crazy thunderstorms and blizzards growing up in the Midwest as well as many small earthquakes here in Southern California.

I live on the east coast of the US, and I've experienced about four earthquakes in my lifetime. None very big.

Does the 2024 election count?

Hurricane Sandy in Connecticut. My house caught on fire…twice…when a tree fell on some wires and caused power to backfeed into my home. Luckily I didn’t touch anything or I might not be here to tell the tale. It was supposedly put out once (fire was inside the walls), and I was allowed back to fetch a few essentials, but it filled up with smoke again because of a hot spot or something…and I had to convince dispatch to send a truck out a second time. I was displaced for three months and lost about 85% of my belongings. Luckily some VERY brave firefighters prevented my entire house from burning to the ground. 0/10 - do not recommend

I’ve also been in earthquakes, blizzards, and wildfires, but nothing comparable to that experience on a personal level.

A few earthquakes back in the early 2000s (UK)

A flooding in the UK around 2007

Sandstorm in an area called the empty quarter back in 2012

Multiple tropical cyclones every year. They don't really do anything harmful, so we're all chill about them.

Earthquake in 2012

Australia catches fire every half decade or so. Never had anything burn down because the RFS are fucking champions, but having it come near to your property is not uncommon here. When the big fires were going in 2019 we were wearing ppe at times to avoid the smoke inhalation. Wild times.

I've been through a few hurricanes and a couple tornados. I could see where some folks (like the landed gentry or people with families) might be afraid of them and the damage they can wreak, but personally I find them exhilarating.

Stepping out into 70 mile an hour winds and 3 feet of rain or watching a tornado rip apart buildings is humbling. No matter how strong we build our walls, the raw power of nature can still tear them down.

Living near a major river, and having gone to school on an island in that river, flooding always was a topic. Especially when it went with two "once in a century" flood within less than a year.