I’ve lived in Southern California all my life so earthquakes and fires are always just around the corner…  The Northridge quake was quite an experience.  I was managing a bank at Universal Studios and the quake happened early Monday morning - Martin Luther King day.  The banks were closed, so I knew to stay by the phone and wait for a call (I lived south of the epicenter so did not have damage and still had phone service).  The bank’s senior leader was able to reach me by phone and indicated that my branch didn’t experience much damage, so I needed to be sure to open first thing Tuesday morning.  ’Not much damage’ was an incredible understatement.  Four broken windows (10’ x 40’ half inch thick non safety glass cerates a huge mess), lights and ceiling hanging by a thread, marble check writing tables overturned and the biggest shock of all - was the interior vault.  When we got the vault open, all the safe deposit boxes had shifted, it was like an inverted stair case!  I had customers lined up at the door an hour before opening wanting / needing to get into their boxes to check their ‘stuff’.  I swept glass for twelve hours straight…  And seriously, that was ‘not much damage’.  The scariest part was the aftershocks - I was in the vault when a 5.0 hit - the door was swinging closed and I managed to slip through.  Through it all the employees that worked for me - some of whom had suffered not only damage to their homes but PTSD as well - kept on working to ensure that all the clients in the area were taken care of.  I was so proud of how the public all came together to help each other! 

As a fellow California resident, I’ve been in all the major EQ’s since the late 60’s.  From Sylmar to Northridge.   Living in the mid-west briefly I made it through two huger than huge thunderstorms, side stepped two tornadoes, and while travelling in NC one year got to experience a hurricane.  Whew!

Seriously, I’ll take an earthquake any day.  

tornadoes and hurricanes…I was a child when we lived in southern Missouri, and remember getting caught in a grocery store for an hour due to a tornado.  The whole experience was rather exciting to me, at the age of 5, since we got free donuts and oj and hung out in the stock room.  I’m sure my mother was terrified with two young kids, and no way to communicate with my dad to see if he was okay.

As for the hurricanes, if I never have to evacuate or experience another, it will be too soon.  My first was Andrew, which left us without power for nearly a week.  My second, Lillie, hit the day of homecoming my senior year and left us with a dozen downed oak trees and no power for a week.  05 we had Rita, which was the worst experience I’ve ever had to date.  We stayed home because my dad had just been in a severe accident and couldn’t travel in a car for more than an hour, and evacuation horror stories of 8-10 hours in a car to get less than 100 miles away kept us home.  I thought the roof would lift off the house, and luckily the tree that fell in the back yard missed our house by about 4 feet.  No power, water, phones or cell service for almost 10 days, and couldn’t get in touch with my husband’s family for about 4 days.  I can’t imagine how it felt to them to not be able to hear from their son, not knowing if we made it alright.  Then this year we left for Gustav, not bad but had houseguests for a week who got hit hard, then Ike, which scared the everliving hell out of me because we didn’t evacuate. As much as evacuating sucks, I don’t think I’ll ever ignore an evacuation - the constant worry about losing my life until it is over is much worse than the worry about belongings left behind.

I remember two hurricanes I was in.  Can’t remember the dates though.  One was on Fire Island on Long Island, the windows came flying in, but the people were walking around barefoot anyway.

 The other was in Bermuda, my ship was docked in port, again everyone was walking around.  The stores gave us rain capes.

Well, I don’t scare easily.

In 1969 there were incredible floods in my area.  I live in a canyon with a north south and east exit only.  The northern part of the canyon was flooded all the way across the road, to the south a bridge and the road went out, and the eastern canyon had a huge landslide which blocked the road.  We figured if it got worse we would have to ride the horses out, but we weren’t even sure if they could get a footing going up the hills. Helicopters dropped food and water in our alfalfa field.

1970 there was a fire that burned all the way from the beach inland to our area - about 30 miles.  We went to bed about 11:30 because the fire had moved away from us, at about 2am there were bullhorns blasting in the circular drive - it was the sheriff telling us to evacuate - NOW.  We didn’t have time to load the horses so we put them in a field that had a wire fence and turned the rainbirds on at the periphery.  Found all the cats and dogs, our grandma and grandpa lived on the ranch and got them in a car.  I had pets in my VW Bug and my mom sent us down the road away from the danger - almost.  I remember the image of my dad and my little brother up on the roof in fireman’s coats and helmets with a fire hose (per code on the ranch) fighting the fire so it didn’t hit the house.  My brother was only 10 years old.  I was amazed at him, but knew he and my dad would be all right.

Heading down the road there were trees on fire on both sides with flames blazing and circling above us, like a canopy of fire.  We had to ride down the center of the road because it was so hot.  I touched my window and it was as hot as a singing kettle.  We all got out but when my mother was checking us into a hotel she turned to my dad and said - "My work is up there," (her book she was writing) and "I have to go back."  So they plowed back up the canyon and there were some firemen with a truck stopped by the side of the road.  My parents told them the situation and they said they had no water in their tank - we had hydrant so up they went to the ranch.  The firemen waited for  the fire to come down the hill and just stood there and sprayed it out.  My mom made them breakfast on the bar-b-que and she learned that they hadn’t slept in a couple of days, when she offered them rest in the house, all they wanted were some blankets to lay on the cool grass under the trees and cold water, as well as some eye wash to clean their eyes. My parents obliged.

Then the ‘71 earthquake - more fires, more floods and then the ‘93 earthquake.  We were situated on the first ring of the epicenter, and unless you have been through an earthquake it is hard to describe the noise.  The 71 was loud but a roller, the 93 was a shaker and it sounded like a freight train coming through with rocks shaking in all the cars.

Two years ago we had another wild fire - The Buckweed (wheat) fire. With the high winds it burned about 15 miles in an hour - that is crazy fast.  We almost lost our house 3 times except for the brilliant work of the French Canadian Pilots in their yellow water planes.  Like flowers to me - flying through the sky.  We are on a slight rise so when they would come down for their approach we could almost see into the cockpit - the wind was blowing so hard that you could see the wings wobble as they were holding position - we would cheer as they flew overhead.  Wonderful. 

I was in a major flood in New Mexico in 1988.  In NM, we have arroyos, which most people would probably look at and say, "what happened to the creek?  It’s all dried up," but are actually used for runoff when we have our monsoon season.

It’s pretty common in the monsoon season to have a day when you are driving through water deep enough to come in your car doors, but this was particularly bad.  I remember getting to an intersection near my home and the rain coming down so quickly that it looked like I was about to drive into a swimming pool that had suddenly appeared in front of me.

The city got 15 inches of rain in just over 8 hours.  The arroyos, typically about 11 feet deep and about as wide as a two-lane road were filled with dirt and debris, and the runoff was flowing on city streets, causing huge amounts of damage.  A girl I knew was killed when she tried to drive through an arroyo diversion (a shallow spot where the arroyo crosses a road) and was swept away.  Her car was destroyed, roof torn off, pushed 1/4 of a mile downstream from where she drove in, and her body was found another 1/4 of a mile further away, on the road.

Now I live in Colorado, in an area where flood potential is high but not commonly seen, like it was in NM.  My coworkers worry me when they say things like, "oh, if we get the flood warning, I’ll just jump in my car and drive home."  They have no idea what happens when a 10-foot wall of water comes at you.  I need to bring in the pictures of my friend’s destroyed car and show them that you don’t mess around when that water is coming.  It goes around, and through, and over, and under eveyrthing and you can’t just make it stop so you can get past it.

Blizzard of 77 in Southtowns of Buffalo NY.  Jimmy Carter declared Erie county a disaster.  We had 22 ft drifts of snow.  Fortunately we never lost power.  When the snow was falling, you could literally stick out your arm and not be able to see your hand at the end of it - true zero viability.  The wind was high and the snow often fell sideways.  At first it was exciting, but you’d watch it, and it seemed like it would never end.  You go out and shovel every few hours (when you could see enough so you wouldn’t get lost)  and your muscles would get so sore and it still kept coming.  We had to get the snow thrower out through the living room front door (if we opened the garage door we never would have been able to get it closed again - the snow would have caved into the garage - the drift against the door was over 8 feet tall).  The drift in the back yard was as tall as our 1 story house.  At least it didn’t drift on our roof.  Some flat roofed stores collapsed under the weight of the snow.  It took us 3 days to dig a walking path to the end of our driveway (our driveway was 2 car lengths long) , and after awhile you couldn’t throw the snow high enough to make any progress.  It was so cold, even salt wouldn’t melt the snow.  I had to keep moving the bird feeders higher and higher in the trees since they kept getting buried.  Some people spent days digging out their driveway, then would stand at the end of the driveway with a shotgun to warn off street plows from dumping a huge lump back in the driveway again.  In the end, they needed high lifting front loaders and back hoes to lift it up and out of the street.  In some areas they’d put the snow in dump trucks, then drive them out onto Lake Erie to dump it there.  Trains with open topped cars were filled with snow so it would melt on it’s way south.  School was closed for at least 2 weeks, longer in a few places.  Travel was only possible by snow mobile for awhile, and people who had them were delivering insulin and other medicines and baby formula to people and getting Dr and nurses to hospitals.  Street looked like canyons for the longest time even after life got back to normal.  In places where snow had been piled high, it became glacial hard and took months to melt.

The Ice Storm of 76 wasn’t as dramatic as the blizzard, but we were out of power a long time for that one.  Every twig was covered with at least 3 inches of ice and trees would explode under the weight.  I remember coming home from school and going out back to look at some branches that had come down.  We’d already had a little snow, and the layer of ice on top of it made it akward to walk on (step hold sink repeat).  When I finished looking (the ice was very beautiful), I was walking away when I hear a creak, and I took off running.  Another branch came down where I had been standing, and little chuncks of ice encrusted twigs raced across the ice in front of me as I ran.  It sounded like a huge crystal chandelier had come crashing down. When the warmer air came in, a very thick fog developed.  It was spooky.  My Mom came down with pleuracy and we had to evacuate to a friends house in Hamburg.  They had a fireplace and gas heat there.  It took us a long time to get there, It was hard to see and branches and power lines were down everywhere.  Transformers were sparking and exploding.  Clean up involved a lot of chain saws and there was a huge surplus of firewood next year.  With the power out, our sump pump was out and our basement got about 6 inches of water.  We were able to move everything high enough to keep it dry.

Given a choice of disaster, I think hurricanes and tornados would freak me out the most.

I was born in California during an earthquake.  We have survived the Sylmar, Northridge and Whittier Earthquakes.  They always seem to happen when we are having coffee and the first thing both of us do is put our hand over the top of the coffee cup.  Mostly, the earthquakes have been rolling ones that make you a bit queasy and when the rolling stops you wonder how long it will be until the aftershocks begin so you are always a bit on edge.  HOWEVER, I will take earthquakes over fire any day.  In October of 1993 I put on a cotton dress to go to work and found heat and dryness and Santa Ana winds when I went to the garage.  The Santa Anas make your skin feel freezing sometimes and so hot you can barely stand it at other times.  When I arrived at work about ten minutes later the fellow I worked for told me that there was a raging fire which had begun on Laguna Canyon Road and it was traveling South toward Newport Beach.  I immediately started back home and found masses of traffic going toward Laguna Beach which had been blocked by the police so that only residents could be admitted.  In our city we have only three ingress and egress points.  The police suggested that everyone prepare to evacuate.  My husband was in Palm Springs and all my kids were in various colleges, etc.  By the time I got home the fire had traveled one mile through the hilly inland area and the only thing separating me from the fire was the Pacific Coast Highway.  My daughter-in-law called from Florida and said the news was on CNN and the grandchildren thought I "might get burned up".  I talked to them and told them I could just swim out to the rocks off Fisherman’s Cove and sit there until the fire burned itself out.  The fire continued in the Hills, it began to make its own wind, moved north, then south, then back again. Fire fighters came to our aid from all over, Helicopters were bucketing water from the ocean, etc.  The most peculiar thing about the fire was that we had electricity, telephone service and people I had worked with in a high rise in Newport Beach kept me informed how far the fire had traveled (CNN kept showing the first day’s film).  I had packed the car for evacuation but since the fire had not crossed the highway I kept hoping for the best.  After three days the fire had almost subsided.  Nearly 300 homes had burned to the ground in our little city of only l5,000 people, leaving nothing more than ash and fireplaces still standing.  The fire had been investigated.  An arsonist had started it.  Little rabbits and squirrels had come out of the ground and were running for their lives, caught on fire and spread the fire quickly in the dry brush.

When I finally peeked out the front door the sky over the ocean was a massive red as was the ocean.  I looked down and found I was barefooted and had on that same cotton dress that I had put on to go to work three days earlier and had been sleeping on a couch in the front of the house.

They never found the arsonist.