Asklemmy

Hurricane Harvey was a bastard of a storm.

I was up all hours of the night for days on end keeping tabs on the flood control reservoir at the end of my street only a few houses away, it got dangerously close to overflowing but fortunately never did.

Craziest thing, I remember being inside my house in the middle of the day all dark no power, and I hear the unmistakable sound of a military helicopter getting closer and closer and suddenly the house was starting to shake. I ran outside and looked up and there was a Blackhawk hovering no higher than 50 meters directly above my house and a soldier poking their head out the side looking straight down, I swear we made eye contact it was so close. Fucking wild.

Have born

I've been through some significant droughts, which are probably worse overall that the few minor floods and forest fires.

Both major freezes in the last 5 years in Texas.

Florida. Need I say more?

I live in New York, so natural disasters are pretty rare other than the random hurricane, though I have experienced about four earthquakes (though mild) in my lifetime, and once a tornado came through my neighborhood.

Tied between Hurricane Sandy (I was literally in Connecticut and the winds were still bad) and a recent-ish (March 2023) wind storm here in Kentucky. 70mph winds. Very fun. A McDonalds got can opener-ed. Power was out for 3 days, and we were some of the first. Worst winds in a couple of decades.

When I was little we had a bad storm that knocked down turns of trees and took out the power for like a week.

More recently, various wildfires in California. We fortunately didn't need to evacuate, but we were ready and could see the flames cresting the hills of the state park from our house.

Either the worsening wildfire smoke blankets (do these have a name aside from just saying its smoky af?), one of the heat domes from recent years, or one of the bouts of terrible snow storms/deep freezes

There was one in particular that almost did me in because I have no skills that would've helped.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Nargis

Probably the May 5th tornado outbreak.

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.

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