The weather, very peculiar

[Korey]

[font="Tahoma"]This year has been a landmark year for bad weather. We had the Earthquake and resulting Tsunami effect a ton of people in the Eastern Pacific. Tornadoes rip across the midwest of the US.

So I did some digging and found the top 10 natural disasters as listed by Death toll:

[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters"]Wiki's List of Natural Disasters[/url]

In terms of Devastation, I'd say the country hardest hit by a natural disaster in recent memory was Haiti, because of the already super impoverished nature of that Country. In fact, the incoming hurricane Irene has brought a lot of heavy rain to the region, which still hurts the people living in tents and shanties trying to somehow rebuild.

The earthquake and tsunami that crippled the northeast region of Japan has done an estimated 300 billion dollars worth of damage and left hundreds of thousands of people misplaced from their homes and unable to return in some cases because of the fallout from the Radiation plant in Fukushima.

Fortunately enough for me, I've only experienced a few natural disasters in my life, but mostly just flooding. Do you guys live in an area that is affected by natural disasters? Have you ever been caught up in one? What do you guys usually do when Mother Nature is giving you grief?
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[PiroMunkie]

[color="#006400"]The only things I've ever seen here in Nebraska/Iowa are tornadoes, though I don't think I've had a legitimate tornado warning since I was pretty young. There's occasionally a "possible tornado" but I don't think any of them touch down here too often.

Usually when it gets really storming out I just keep doing what I'm doing because nothing ever comes of it except a lot of noise, maybe a brief power outage, and worst case scenario one of the old crappy trees out back loses some branches, lol.[/color]

[Sangome]

[color="#9932CC"][font="Microsoft Sans Serif"]Here in the Midwest, tornadoes and severe weather overall is the normality during springtime. While we're not as bad as some states get it, we still plenty of scares and tornado watches/warnings each year. And you'd think that would make me used to them, right? Nope. Terrified of them.

Some noteworthy happenings:

Around when I was...I'm not sure when, but between the ages of 12 and 14, I remember a storm accompanied with a warning. It was like...6, 7 o'clock at night during DST, and yet it was absolutely [i]black[/i] outside. It looked like it was midnight. Nothing wound up happening, but it still scared me to death, and I think that's what kicked off my fear of tornadoes.

Back in 08, we had easily the worst storm I had ever been in. There were no tornadoes in my particular part of the storm, but that didn't really matter considering this storm was monstrous, with 100+ MPH winds. I was crying and praying in my closet, because I seriously thought I was going to die. I had no idea what was going on. Power was out for a week [longer for some!], places were impassible due to the massive amounts of debris, and it as all around not a fun time.

And then this year, it seemed like we were glued to a radar for three months straight; storms pretty much every week. Then one day in May we got planted under a "high risk" for severe weather, and since the Joplin tornado had [i]just[/i] happened that week, everyone [myself included] was freaking out. Outside of a buttload of funnel clouds and maybe one or two EF1 tornadoes that touched down in other spots, we were relatively unscathed.[/font][/color] Edited August 27, 2011 by Sangome

[Boo]

We in the Netherlands had nothing to fear of big stormy things until this talk about big tsunamis getting rid of the Netherlands within 40-100 years. Until then [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953"]this was the worst thing[/url] probably.

[TheShinje]

On the 4th September 2010 we were hit by a massive earthquake 7.1 on the Richter scale. It devastated our town and shook the hell out of us. Then there were literally thousands of aftershocks, the worst on February 22 this year which claimed 183 lives. Our city is wrecked and it will never be the same again, it's been a year from hell.
seven thousand plus aftershocks and still going, although they are quieting down now, which is reason to be happier.

Not exactly weather related, but you mentioned the Japan earthquake so I thought I'd mention ours to the mix. ;) Edited September 10, 2011 by Saiyangohan2002