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Being in California, I have been through my fair share of earthquakes. Northridge was the biggest one and gave a decent jolt and I had a light fall from the ceiling, but otherwise the house has managed the quakes fine.
In the wild fires of last year, my house was luckily not in danger, but it did effect our family as we sheltered our family friends who lived in a home in Foothill Ranch that backed up to the fire area. They stayed with us for a week and were a complete nervous wreck. My kids had school canceled because the smoke was so bad as ash settled in and blanketed the Saddleback Valley.
Here is what it looked like at night as the flames burned toward homes. It is a beautiful and frightening photo at the same time as the flames reflect into Lake Mission Viejo.
we use to have small tornadoes touch down on the outskirts of town in Eastern NM,some would do a little damage to town but most are minor, I was also in the flood that El Paso got 2 years ago, we were going to go into Mexico but the border was closed.
I havent been in a wild fire but I have seen em burning though, we get them every year it seems like in NM.
Sadly alot of the windows Downtown are still boarded up. It's been a month since the Hurricane hit and the windows haven't been replaced yet. Same goes for some of the buildings Uptown and in Greenway Plaza. Alot of the buildings look like they belong in a war torn city and not in the U.S.
It will be nice when everything looks normal again.
The only natural disaster i've been in is Hurricane Ike. The biggest hassle for me was being without electricty a few days. I'm worried that another storm will come next summer and i'm pretty sure if another hurricane approaches the upper Texas coast I will be heading north to Dallas. The wind was alot more intense than I expected. For at least 5 hours I was scared my roof would be ripped off. It was nice having a few days off from school and work.
My biggest worry is that people will freak out and cause another stampede out of the city that will kill people again, just because they don't want to deal with not having power for a little while. If you're in a well-built structure in Houston or some place further inland from the coast, a storm the strength of Ike shouldn't tear your roof off. To put it in perspective - you're probably more likely to get in a wreck or break down on the road during an evacuation than you are of having some sort of major structural damage to your house or whatever you live in. A stronger storm might be different, but for something like Ike evacuations are probably better reserved for people who live on the coast (e.g. Galveston) or people with special needs. For that matter, evacuating inland doesn't guarantee that you won't lose power if you end up in the path of the storm's remnants. Ike caused power outages as far away as Canada, and people inland might have to wait just as long to get power restored because of electric crews converging on the spot where the storm made landfall. Workers came from all over the place in the effort to restore power to the Houston area after Ike, which means they weren't in other places inland that were affected.
History would indicate that it'll be some time, possibly a decade or two, before another major hurricane hits this part of Texas. But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen next year - it's just that it's not necessarily likely.
Too bad I could only choose one disaster, I've been in a few: Hurricane, flood, earthquake, ice storm, and one not listed- volcanic eruption.
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