I live in tornado alley

I was on a camping trip in Panama, and because there’s no service in the jungle, didn’t know that a hurricane was coming. I rode out hurricane David in a tent on the side of a mountain.

Surprisingly I’m no longer a fan of camping.

2011 Tohoku earthquake

The Baltic sea just had a once-in-a-century storm surge this fall. There was little danger since the baltic sea is rather well protected, but many local dikes weren’t up for the job, resulting in quite some damage (in general, the houses on my island were mostly unscathered).

Took us the better of two months to drain the water from the island, and in the meantime we had to hike along the more robust dikes to get to the harbor.

We also had to empty our lakes of saltwater to attempt and save our fire-bellied toads, as the Copenhagen Zoo is trying to preserve the species on the island.

2022 Australian floods. Woken up pre-dawn by a car alarm set off by rising flood waters. Thankfully I had the foresight to park up on the street, which was a higher level, because water was more than half way up the height of the wheels by then in my garage.

All the proper roads out of the area were flooded already before I left, but thankfully I could get out by driving through pedestrian areas of the university I live near.

That was a very anxiety-ridden day as I waited until I could go back to assess the damage. Luckily the water only reached about 3/4 the height of the garage, which is below the 1st floor apartments. My apartment is at the top of a very small (like 5 m vertical) hill, just enough that we got off safe when neighbours did far, far worse.

2003 Canberra bushfires. My little city was made to burn.

2019 Black Summer bushfires - see: whole fucking country either on fire or enveloped in smoke. I owned a tonne of masks before Covid hit.

We’ve been lucky in the last few bushfires seasons since but it won’t last.

The 2019 Memorial Day tornado outbreak. Less than a week away from the 5 year anniversary of it.

My apartment is located roughly 500 feet (152 meters) from the end point of an EF4 tornado that hit and about 1500 feet (~450 meters) of the start point of an EF3 tornado that hit. One ended and the other began within minutes of each other.

I recall I looked out of my front door and could only see the sideways winds. I had just woken up after sleeping all day because I was tired, having stayed up late the night before, burying my cat which had eaten mouse poison, which I was unaware of the symptoms for until it was too late. I had to bury my cat a second time then next day and broke my hand in frustration while doing it.

My power was out for 10 days and I had no water for 6 days. I didn’t own a car and public transportation had halted in my area from trees blocking the roads. I walked 4.5 miles to a nearby Urgent Care for my hand but they had closed due to damage. From there I walked 9 miles to the nearest hospital. They had too many people. I gave up waiting to be seen after 8 hours and went home, then wrapped my hand with bandages myself, around an old brace I had from a previous unrelated broken wrist.

When my power came back, I learned that a power surge had fried the power supply of my computer. I eventually managed to check my email at the community college, which is when I learned my health insurance coverage through Medicaid had ended, thanks to an order from the president at the time.

My absentee landlord never checked on the building. Less than a month later, the in-wall A/C unit fell out of the wall, leaving a hole large enough for me, a 6’3" 250 lb man, to easily crawl through. It was there for 6 months before it was repaired by the landlords maintenance person, who bought a cheap window unit A/C and stuck it in the hole then filled in around it with expanding foam.

The hole was ‘fixed’ around the same time I was able to buy a replacement power supply for my computer. My data storage drive had also stopped working and I learned an important lesson regarding backups. That was right around Christmas time.

Unrelated to the tornados, that’s about when I started passing kidney stones. I tried to go to the hospital for them but without insurance, they turned me away. It wasn’t considered an emergency. I missed several days of work while I passed them at home. Work said because of the amount of time I missed, I needed a doctors note to return to work. Work would schedule me 6 hour shifts, 6 days a week, which comes to 36 hours. Employees needed 40 hours a week to be considered full time and to qualify for the company insurance. Without insurance, I couldn’t find a doctor who would see me. I was terminated and the reason they listed was that I abandoned my job.

My official last day with the company was 31 December 2019. I was ready to start a new year. 2019 had not been kind to me. I remember thinking to myself on New Years Day “At least 2020 can’t possibly be worse, right?”

Slow one but- several years of drought and then bug infestation of some of our forests.

It affected badly planted forests (monocultures) but still it is sad to see bare places you remember covered.

There are several of these man made disasters around here but this one is most visible.

The worst was also the funniest. An earthquake hit while I was on the toilet.

2010 chilean Earthquake and tsunami (8.8), and the 2016-17 forest fires too

Chile has an extreme propensity to natural disasters, but Chileans have learn to deal with them so they aren’t that bad, like after the 2010 8.8 quake there was an 8.5 or so in 2015 that caused little damage because lessons were learned, consider that quakes over 6.0 happens every year or two in chile, also we have floods, forest fires? Volcanoes, landslide, etc.

My grandma felt the 9.5 Valdivia quake (biggest earthquake recorded in world history) and shortly after started working in the ministry of infrastructure, she always says she had to type “devastated area” a lot lol, my mom also felt her fair share of quakes too, and my parents were just away from Santiago (the city where we live) when a enormous flood hit here and caused a ton of damage, and we’re not talking about the natural disasters that happened in other areas of the county, like more quakes, floods, forest fires and volcanoes…

Yeah, if you want to safely-ish experience natural disasters, come live in chile! Lmao.

Climate change in general.

Weather getting worse and worse

Hurricane Irene in the Caribbean in, what, 2011? Luckily we were tucked up safely in a hotel with a concrete structure but it still scared the crap out of us.

We thought our windows and patio door were going to blow out and we used all the bedding and towels to stop water coming in under the door. It soaked up so much water that we couldn’t lift them in the morning.

Thankfully I think it dropped to a cat 2 (?) as it hit land, so damage wasn’t as bad as expected. Still, our hearts broke when we saw the damage to the island and homes as we returned to the airport a few days later. I don’t know how the locals deal with it every year.

Glass fire in central California, I saw it the very first morning on my way to work (a Sunday), had no idea it was going to become as big as it did.

The Kaikoura Earthquake in November 2016. Imagine lying between the rails of a railway track and having a freight train pass over you - our whole HOUSE was shaking like that.

And we were HUNDREDS of kilometers away from the epicenter.

A hurricane. Which is pretty mild for natural disasters, but some of my neighbours lost their roofs.