I grew up in a home without a basement in Kansas. We had to go to a community shelter whenever the sirens went off. It sort of gave me weather PTSD. I live in New Mexico now, where it's a bit windy in the spring and the summers have violent monsoon rains. I basically freak the F out, even though there aren't tornados here. It's just unnerving. I'm getting used to it little by little though.
Greetings. I'm a native North Dakotan, presently an old man living in a more temperate region. Growing up I lived through many blizzards which have to be experienced to be believed. Anyway you asked about tornado stories. I was 16 years old and was sitting on the front porch of my home as a storm roared into town. My dad came to the doorway to suggest I go into the basement. I looked up into the pitch black sky ready to make a snide teenager statement when a barrage of lightning lit the world and revealed a tornado going by me about 50 yards away and going about 50 mph. It is an event I've never forgotten. Mostly in those years I saw the sad aftermath of their passage. Have a good day.
Wow. We almost never actually get one here in western ( Dunn co. ) WI, but serious watches most summers. But a deadly one happened when my dad was young, a man about his age I grew up knowing, a fellow local dairy farmer, lost his parents & baby brother to a silo going down on top of them. More recently, and strangely enough while I was living in northern IL for a few years, where they get more actual tornadoes more often, there was one not too far from my home town area back home. But while we have nearly as bad of winter weather, the severe cold etc. here, we don't have it quite as bad as ND ( would here all the temps etc. when listening to the weather radio carefully, on the farm ).
@@ajb.822 The whole northern stretch from Idaho through to New York has one variation of another of the weather that looks good on Hallmark cards but otherwise has to be lived through to be believed. The Derecho that blasted Iowa last August brought back big memories for me, boy howdy.
wow. I would have probably needed a clean pair of pants after that. I Live in NC and have been very luck to have gone through a tornado (knock on wood) they have hit around where I live but have never personally affected me before.
I'm from South Carolina and when I was stationed in Georgia, my fellow navy southern guys and I would get out the grill any time a hurricane would come.
The_SCP _Foundation lol my grandma would always tell by looking at the clouds so I’m more than willing to bet he was doing the same but was convincing you all it was his nose just cuz he was a cheeky little shit. Lol he sounds like a great guy or at the very least a hilarious one :)
As a child, I lived on a farm in the Midwest. We were on a party line. After tornadoes, the party line would be abuzz. "I have the top to somebody's silo here, and a shaggy brown dog. Anyone seen my mailbox or patio table?" I loved the adventure of checking the fields and ponds for our neighbors' missing items.
The stuggle: If you live in tornado ally- build your house low and have a basement If you live in a flood zone- put everything on stilts and basement is a bad idea If you live in both at the same time- suffer
I can't imagine living off ground level, like I used to have a 3rd floor bedroom when my family lived near DC but now? A ranch style manner house is enough altho I do currently live in a 3rd floor flat so I guess I'm back up here
The struggle is real. Make sure you keep your most precious possessions in air tight containers. Unless they are things that need air. Have about 500 emergency plans. Oh yeah. Label everything in weather proof ink and then add about 4 layers of clear duct tape to make sure the weather doesn’t actually erase it.
A couple of thoughts. The largest earthquake actually occurred in New Madrid, Missouri in the early 1800's. Alaska also gets some very strong quakes, close to 9.0. Also a hurricane doesn't have to be a category 5 to be bad. Even a "mere" tropical storm can be devastating.
Alaska suffered the 2nd largest earthquake in history after the Chile earthquake of 1960, a magnitude 9.5. On Good Friday, 1964, Alaska experienced a magnitude 9.2 quake resulting in wide spread destruction and very large tsunami that killed people in Hawaii, Japan and California to name a few locations where tsunami came ashore. The quake lasted 5 minutes.
Deep Dive did an excellent half-hour video on that named "Why Earthquakes in the East are so much more Dangerous". While I still HIGHLY recommend people watch it, the TL;DR for the title is that the underlying rock is much more solid, which causes the energy to transmit much further and more strongly and absorb and dissipate less. (i.e. The bedrock behaves more like a ringing bell and less like something that makes a thudding or thwacking noise when hit.)
@@williamscoggin1509 Funny thing is, a lot of people don't realize Tornado Alley extends up into Canada and we get the second-most in the world. If I'm reading the numbers right, we get about the same occurrence per square mile/km... we just have less absolute land area that's part of Tornado Alley.
Washington gets earthquakes, occasional tornadoes, occasional cyclones and we have several of the most dangerous volcanos in the world. In other words, Californians go back, it's far more dangerous up here. Perhaps you should go somewhere safe like Oregon.
I'm also from Ohio and old enough to remember when they used to make us open the classroom windows during drills to, "equalize the pressure". One of the many silly myths we used to believe about tornadoes!
Vince P When I lived in Brisbane, Australia as an exchange student in 87-88, I was at school one day and the sky turned green. I told my teacher I was getting out of there (a 2nd floor room with 3 walls of windows) because a tornado was coming. I was told I was crazy, they don't have tornadoes there. I responded, Iam not crazy. I have seen a green sky twice in my life, and twice tornadoes ripped through the town. Not long after we were all told we had to stay (it was time to go home from school). My teacher wanted to put us in this porch area below the classroom that was open. I said no way in hell was I going there, either. I said I am going to go sit in that field over there. My teacher told me, that was stupid, I would be right out in the open. I said it beats under here. This is going to create w wind tunnel and makes the winds even stronger. I said laying down in s field is safer. Well my teacher and 7 of my friends went with me. Then the sky turned blue again and everything was ok. My teacher told us the next day, a cyclone had hit Paupa New Guinea and that was the reason it looked like there was going to be a tornado. The teacher wanted to know how I knew the fieldwould be safer, I told her I spent alot of time in the hallways at schoo, sitting on the floor with my head between my knees and while we were all practicing for a tornado they also told us what to do if a basement with no windows, bathroom with no windows, or a hallway with no windows was not available to us. The internet was just beginning to become available, so she did research the old fashioned way, in a library, and found out I was right. I told her, they could have suspended me for being sassy to a teacher, but there was no way I was going to sit in the classroom, or in that area under the classroom no matter what. What I had been told todo my entire life contradicted what I was being told to do.
That's our attitude, but I was surprised to learn that our weather is more extreme than most. Our area explains the sheer number of storms, but not their strength.
@@kathryngeeslin9509 it's geography; warm gulf of Mexico water, turbulent air coming over the Rockies to suck the warm gulf air up into the plains, where the colder turbulent air and the warm wet air mix, then nice flat prairies to act as a nice thermal sink to produce columns of rising air... And not a land feature to be seen to break up the tracks of the storms. Perfect blender for creating titanic thunder cells. I used to spend afternoons watching the cells build and grow; rows and columns of massive anvilheads, marching across the sky like soldiers at parade.
@@lairdcummings9092 Brings to mind this, "Missouri has a continental type of climate marked by strong seasonality. In winter, dry-cold air masses, unchallenged by any topographic barriers, periodically swing south from the northern plains and Canada. If they invade, reasonably humid air, snowfall and rainfall result. In summer, moist, warm air masses, equally unchallenged by topographic barriers, swing north from the Gulf of Mexico and can produce copious amounts of rain, either by fronts or by convectional processes. In some summers, high pressure stagnates over Missouri, creating extended droughty periods. Spring and fall are transitional seasons when abrupt changes in temperature and precipitation may occur due to successive, fast-moving fronts separating contrasting air masses." --> I would not have guessed that last bit about rainfall, "All of Missouri experiences "extreme" climate events, and such events must be considered part of the normal climate. Though infrequent in occurrence and often very geographically restricted, these �disturbances� produce environmental changes that may not otherwise have happened and that may be relatively long lasting in their effect. Among these extreme climatic events are high-intensity rains, protracted drought, heat waves and cold waves, ice storms, windstorms, and tornadoes. These climatic events, in turn, may lead to other environmental disturbances such as floods, fires, landslides, and abrupt changes in plant and animal populations and distributions. High-intensity precipitation characterizes all regions of Missouri. The town of Holt in northwestern Missouri holds the world record for a high-intensity rain, having received 12 inches within a 42-minute period on June 22, 1947." Source: Climate of Missouri, Wayne L. Decker Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri
I’m from New England, I was actually working while a tornado tore through Springfield Massachusetts and legit watched it go by as a woman in front of me tried to order a sandwich and couldn’t understand why I was closing
I'm from S. Illinois when I was in first grade out school had a skylight. I literally watched a tornado from directly above me through it tornados are crazy.
I grew up on the Massachusetts north shore. That tornado really fucked me up. I have relatives that live just outside Springfield - so i was worried abouth them - and even over here, north of Boston, the sky and calm before it hit was incredibly ominous. I was already in my 20s then but I LOVED the Wizard of Oz movie as a kid and was always told growing up that Massachusetts couldn't get tornadoes because of the terrain (that part of the movie TERRIFIED me). It was extremely hard to comprehend that we had an F3 hit....
San Franciso earthquake was bad. However there was a series of earthquakes that happened 1811 -1812 called the New Madrid earthquakes. They took place in Illinois and Misouri. They were so violent that the Missippi River flowed backwards for 3 days, created an island in the river, and communities were completely wiped out. Experts have said were suppose to have another.
I was checking to see if someone wrote about those earthquakes. They had 7 between 6.0 and 7.5 magnitude. It was a blessing that the area wasn't populated like it is now. Since the rocks in the eastern United States have few active faults to interrupt the propagation of seismic waves, ground vibrations from earthquakes generated in the region may travel thousands of miles. Shortly after the earthquake began, ground shaking was felt as far away as Canada in the north and the Gulf Coast in the south. Eyewitness accounts noted that the shaking rang church bells as far away as Boston, Massachusetts, and brought down chimneys in Cincinnati, Ohio, about 360 miles away.
The little town I remember living in in Southern Illinois has flood gates in case the New Mad-rid ever gets angry again. There's a rest stop on 55 that does a really good job of showing where the the fault line is and what happened in the 1800's.
It's very interesting reading the accounts of the settlers about that series of quakes. The people slept outside, in the winter, for more than a month because the ground didn't stop shaking in between the second and third quake.
I was 3 years old and living in Washington state when Mount St. Helens erupted. I remember asking my parents why it was dark (at about 2 pm) and later why it was snowing (watching the ash fall outside). They told me about the eruption, but it didn't really make sense at the time. We have home movies of my dad sweeping ash off the roof of his shop. And as he cut his hay crop, ash billowed up behind the swather. He had to sharpen the blades on the swather after every pass down the field because the ash dulled them so quickly. Amazing!
In "80 my car was repainted & it was supposed to be sanded before the clearcoat put on. Instead, my hubby and I drove it to Seattle for a long wk-end then back to Idaho. When we got back & washed off the thick coat of ash, the rough coat of paint felt like glass. No one could have polished it smoother. It was an amazing surprise.
I was less than 70 miles from it when she popped. It was incredible to me , as the year before I was on top of it staring at the vent. We're all still waiting for Rainier
I was in high school when it blew. We lived in Lake Tapps, about 30 minutes east of Tacoma, up on the hill. Was a Sunday morning, and we were getting ready for church. Heard a muffled *WHUMP* and my mom said "I think the mountain blew!" My dad scoffed and insisted that it was maybe a car accident, or maybe just something falling over. We got to church and everyone was abuzz with news oh the eruption. Ha, Dad! We didn't really get any ash, but Eastern WA did, the Toutle valley, and the Portland metro area. Quite a few people still have jars of ash that they collected.
My mother was born and raised in Texas she used to tell stories about the quirky behaviors of tornadoes. She once told me a story about a tornado that destroyed a house and left an infant untouched in its crib. Once an F3 tornado went past our house no more than an eighth of a mile away. I slept through it and only noticed the damage in the morning on my way to work.
lol. grew up in southern wv and fell asleep one night to thunderstorms. apparently there was a tornado and everyone but me woke up. it was a mountaintop city and the tornado jumped over it. of course, it came down on a trailer park
My father, born into the a Great Depression in September 1929, told me that, when he was a small child, a tornado passed over the shack that they were living in at the time. His older brother was asleep in the bed and the roof was pulled off of the house. The water was coming down in buckets, but my uncle slept through it all 🙄
I saw a picture online of a house that had been leveled except part of the bathroom. A boy had survived the huge tornado uninjured by holding onto the toilet. Tornadoes are capricious, and sometimes that works in favor of the survivors.
Yeah, but us living in the US, particularly my Idahoan bum, we'll be the lucky ones dying quickly. Instead of slowly due to volcanic induced global winter for 2 to 3 years. In short, everyone on earth will be screwed if and when the caldera event happens.
When I was a kid in Iowa, back in the 1970s, my dad would get drunk, make popcorn & BBQ on the front porch in anticipation of the approaching tornado. My mother would huddle us all into the basement with a battery operated radio, some candles & matches and some large tins of reserve water. The kids would sit back, listen to the radio, eat snacks and watch my mother panic and scream obscenities to my dad upstairs. Ah, the good old times.
Growing up in Tennessee, we'd argue with my Dad as kids about wanting to sit outside with him to watch the tornados. You could say he wanted to protect us, but I know the truth; he just wanted to ruin our fun. :p
@@leadpaintchips9461 No. They aren't. Supercells develop in minutes tornadoes even faster. What retard would grill in the 6 minutes it would take for that to happen and unlike the wizard of Oz you'd most likely never see the tornado. I've been in 4 hurricanes. You could actually plan a hurricane party. Tornado parties don't exist.
@@timothyarmstrong3801 We did have Biblical locusts. The Locust Plague of 1874 is the worst locust swarm in recorded history. It was 1800 miles long, 110 miles wide, and devastated the Great Plains. Their species name (Caloptenus spretus) means "despised." Laws mandating the elimination of the Rocky Mountain locust, as well as the adoption of different farming cultivars/techniques led to the precipitous decline of the species, and the last one was sighted in 1902.
I’m from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, my family lost our house and everything we own in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Definitely a scary experience. We are good now thankfully :)
I remember this one well.It was a mere four weeks we got hit by Rita.It was the first time our family and friends had to evacuate.Our homes were spared but the trip was not very pleasant!
I was in Livingston perish Louisiana during hurricane Katrina. We were the lucky ones and didn’t lose our home. Many of our friends and family did. I’m glad y’all are ok now. It was a scary experience but showed how many people stick together and helped.
I had family in Gulfport that got out early. When they came home, they had a new lawn ornament in the back yard: a casino. Casino's in Mississippi are illegal if put on land (you read that right) so all of them .. ALL OF THEM.. are on barges somewhere. The one in Gulfport lifted out of the ocean with the swell and a completely flattened anything in it's path with thousands of tons of barge, poker chips, and buildings just riding the waves like a surfer. It parked itself fully on some of the neighbors property but not before flattening my distant relative's house down to the slab.. and it was cracked, scarred and had all the pipes bent out.
Having your emergency radio or your smartphone with that app ringing in the middle of the night with a warning alert is a heart-stopping moment , and everyone who has ever experienced that knows exactly what I'm talking about
I'm convinced this is why older generations have a hard time believing in Global Warming here. If they weather has gotten worse we've barely noticed. Nature was trying to kill us since we first got here. Disease, Wind, Rain, fire or even the Earth opening to swallow us, it's so common we barely flinch at it.
I grew up in the Midwest before moving to Brazil for a while. I never considered how weird my childhood tornado drills would seem to my Brazilian friends.
I moved from Kansas to Arizona a few years ago and the first year I saw a massive dust devil that even had my roommate who was born there going wtf. The monsoons were wonderful to experience because it was almost like being back home.
I was born in New Mexico and can attest to this. Dust devils were the desert version of tornadoes. I was always fearful of those blackish brown walls that were sand storms in the distance. I live in Georgia now and deal with severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, black ice in the winters, COVID-19 like mass panic but with bread and milk for those awesome milk sandwiches instead of toilet paper when a snowflake falls.
Yes, we do like our tornadoes here in the US. Back in the early 80's, my mom's car was actually picked up by a small tornado and planted on the other side of the highway she was driving on. No damage other than a cracked window, because thankfully the bulk of an overpass bridge seemed to have altered the wind enough that it didn't flip her car. Then, when I was about 14, our farm got narrowly missed by a tornado. It ripped down all the trees in our front yard, but didn't damage our house. However, it did rip the metal roof off our neighbors barn, which clipped our chimney as it passed over and then planted at a 45 degree angle into our hay field. The next morning, our neighbor, who was not all together stable mentally, came over with the police saying that we had stolen his barn roof. Lets just say the officer didn't make a fuss for OBVIOUS reasons. haha
In Alabama, if there is a slight chance of snow, schools either cancel or get delays. Now if there is a 100% chance of tornados we go to school, no cancellations, or delays. It doesn't help that our newer built schools are built as functioning storm shelters.
I live in Alabama and actually what happens is that an hour before the tornadoes are forecast to start dropping from the sky, the schools cancel the rest of the day and send all the kids home and the daycare schools close and demand that the kids be picked up forcing many parents to sit in stop-and-go traffic going apoplectic while sirens are blaring and the meteorologists are saying, "Don't be in a manufactured home or a car because that's where most people die."
I’m from Oklahoma and that’s how it is here. Back when I was a kid and in school, late 80s through the 90s, our tornado drills were, go sit in the hall, head down, arms over your head. Let’s not worry about the fact that each end of the hall was solid glass doors to the outside. 😂😂
That used to happen to our school system too, however after the 2011 tornadoes hit, and hundreds of kids were still stuck in school ( the high school chemistry labs got hit), the school system wised up a little.
@@peoples_7736 I remember that storm. That was I was referring to. There was a pretty bad storm somewhere either in the late 90s or early 2000s, that killed a bunch of students. After that they allowed parents to pick up their children during really bad storms and caused schools to be built as shelters. I remember sheltering in the halls in 2011 over my lunch tray licking up the mash potatoes. We haven't had anything to bad since the 2011 storms and we never really had to ever use it. I think we practiced and used code reds (active shooters) more.
Lawrence, I'm originally from Massachusetts and have experienced mumerous hurricanes. I lived in L.A. for many years and experienced severe brush fires, mud slides and quite a few earthquakes, including the 6.7 1994 Northridge earthquake. (We moved out of CA shortly thereafter). Since then we've been in metro Denver, where we've had a couple of smaller tornadoes. If you move around enough, you get to see quite a lot of what the USA has to offer 🙂.
As a young boy growing up in south western Ohio we knew that if the sky turned green to the west during a storm it was time to head to the basement, quickly. Got very little warning in those days of tornadoes on the way.
@JM Saultz I know that smell well. There can also be indicators much earlier in the day. More than once I've been out and about on a beautiful, sunny summer day, and my friends and I have commented "feels like tornadoes might be on the way," and sure enough, they show up later that evening. It's hard to put your finger on what it is, but I think it has something to do with the attitude of the wind and a certain brassy look to the sky. Also, "the calm before the storm" is a very real phenomenon.
@@midwestmatthew9752 Part of that instinctive foreboding is probably also our bodies subconsciously sensing the drop in barometric pressure as the storm approaches.
Question: What about sinkholes? Florida gets some pretty bad ones sometimes. You know where the ground just opens up in the middle of the night with no warning and eats most of your house/possibly you?
Sinkholes in Florida are a man-made phenomenon. Caused by overpopulation, resulting in draining the aquifers. Then, when the upper layers of soil get saturated, they collapse into the empty caverns where the water used to support the upper strata.
@@sueregan2782 While what you say is partially true, that's only for some of the recent ones. There are sink holes in Florida that have been here for hundreds of years as well, and folks didn't get their water from aquifers back then. Most of the underground stone in Florida is limestone, leading to the possibility of the ground just wearing away over time until the surface just collapses.
As a native of northeastern Wisconsin, I so appreciate you covering the Peshtigo Fire, which has historically been overshadowed by the (far less deadly) Great Chicago Fire that occurred on the same day. Accounts of the Peshtigo Fire are horrific. People sought safety by lowering themselves into wells and were then boiled alive. Eyewitnesses reported that the air itself became fire-a literal firestorm that reduced woods, buildings, and bodies to ash in a matter of minutes. Many townspeople only managed to survive by taking refuge in the waters of the Peshtigo River as the fire raged over their heads. It’s a little-known tragedy that deserves wider recognition, in light of the 1,500 human lives lost and the vast destruction of forest, wildlife, and property.
Not a native but a long term resident here. One place i worked back before tje web and email we had magnitude pool. Make your guess put in your quarter then listen to the local news station give out what the usgs in menlo said the magnitude was. To this day i can still guess within 0.2 what ill find on the usgs site a minute later. And have freaked out some of my o.line friends. Me: baby quake? 3.5-3.8. Lemme check. Friends: huh? me after checking: usgs says it was 3.6 epicenter abt 1 mile south of Hollister. Def baby quake.
During the last three quakes, I nudged my dog to stop scratching because I thought that's what was moving the couch. Rest assured, when I realized they had been quakes, I apologized to him. He grudgingly accepted the apology.
That's so funny to me. I've lived here in SoCal all my life, and I am so terribly afraid of earthquakes! We had a tiny little shake a couple nights ago and I was instantly poised and ready to grab baby, dog and cat and bolt the hell out of there LoL
Living in tornado alley, we live through several super cell thunderstorms every year. They are very scary even if they don't produce tornadoes, with wind strong enough to knock over trees and flash flooding washing cars down the street.
"Look at all those actives volcanoes," he says, indicating the American west coast while not mentioning how Iceland is completely obscured by all its red triangles.
Laird made my point. Iceland is actually rather small. I wouldn't want to be on Iceland if they all decided to erupt, but the Pacific Rim volcanoes (not just those on the west coast of the US) put Iceland in the backwaters, even though your island is famous for its volcanoes
@@leifhietala8074I don't doubt that, if anyone survives it will be remembered in history books for hundreds if not thousands of years and will make all recorded eruptions before it seem like childs play
I grew up in Illinois and I distinctly remember the eerie combination of the windy air going suddenly and sickeningly still to the point it just 'felt weird'. Then the air turning this creepy yellow. It wasn't just the sky above you that was yellow, like with a sunset, it was the air surrounding you. It felt like you were living in a movie and somebody changed the color filter and also hit the pause button. Then it would smell like rotting apples, that's when you knew it was getting close. We didn't have a basement so we would kneel on the hallway floor where there were no windows. We would have to face the wall then cover ourselves with a thick blanket and curl into a ball with our hands over our head and neck.
My mom noticed how the sky would turn yellow on a spring 50 years ago when South Carolina had a number of tornadoes, We think one touched down close to our house. We had taken shelter in the basement, but dad noticed this one tree that had been twisted off.
My aunt lives in Joplin and I remember that day the rest of the family all lives in PA and we were all freaking out when we saw the news and no one could get a hold of her. Thank God she was ok though
As a Joplin native, yeah. It was terrible. My family (husband and daughter) were very lucky. We were less than half a mile from the path of the tornado, and if my husband had been at work that evening, like he was asked to be but turned down the hours, he would have been in a building that was hit. So, yes, a scary day in our local history.
I remember seeing the aftermath in TV and thought that was the worst sight I'd ever seen of a natural disaster. Wiped to the foundations. Prayed so much for all of you there. Awful purely awful.
Actually, tornadoes happen every year. Just like we have "road construction season," we also have "tornado season." And, the "Big One" may actually be from the New Madrid fault line, which moves more in the eastern US than people like to admit -- and, if you research the New Madrid fault line, it could be potentially be a 9.5+ on the Richter scale.
When you bleeped yourself while talking calmly about tornadoes, I about jumped and ran to the basement. (It's dark now, no point in going outside to watch...) That's the frequency of the tornado emergency beep here in central Kansas!
Recently had a harrowing experience with a tornado last year in Chicago. I was out running errands with my kids (we were on one of those long tail cargo bikes where the kids sit on the rack in the back). It was cloudy and everything seemed ok outside. I stopped to pick up some McDs a few blocks from my apartment. My husband was on his way home from work. He was going to stay and work longer but something told him to just come back home and not stay. After I pick up the food I get the tornado warning on my phone to seek shelter immediately. As I’m rushing home the cloudy grey sky suddenly turns dark and I can see the supercell forming in the sky right above our neighborhood. I’ve seen supercells and tornadoes on tv but seeing it in real life is really something else, and I’m outside on a bike with my kids which makes it even scarier. I’m a few streets away from my home and my husband is calling me to get back immediately. The rain and winds start and debris and tree branches are flying everywhere. I’m riding against the wind and can barely see anything because there is sooo much rain. I was terrified and just praying we would get home safe. The only way I was able to ride so fast with all that rain and wind going against me was the adrenaline. My kids had no idea the danger we were in. My daughter was just laughing and amused the whole way (we nicknamed her StormChaser after this incident). We get home and my husband is outside our home just screaming “GET IN!!!”. We ran inside with the kids and he went outside to grab the bike. Luckily we made it home safe. The supercell moved towards the lake (Lake Michigan) and touched down in the Rogers Park neighborhood (on the north side of Chicago next to the lake) where it made its way to the lake and turned into a waterspout. I know I’ll definitely never forget this experience and will always remember that feeling of awe and terror at seeing the supercell forming right before my eyes. I’ve lived in the US my entire life but we don’t get tornados often in Chicago so I never thought this was something that would happen to me. Definitely gave me a bigger respect for how unpredictable Mother Nature is. And if you guys ever get a tornado warning take it seriously and get the f**k outta there to shelter immediately, the weather can go from nice to deadly in literally seconds. Tornadoes form fast!
You spoke about hurricane Katrina. Well my mother my daughter and myself stayed in Biloxi Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina. And if the news hasn’t reported everything about New Orleans. You would’ve seen the devastation from Waveland to Pascagoula Mississippi was destroyed. The surge came all the way across the coast and around through Biloxi VA back around through the rivers and marshes. And sweat the houses off their pylons into Interstate 10. It truly broke my heart to see my home pretty much wiped off the planet. Childhood landmarks in memories were gone. The only good thing about hurricane is that you can prepare yourself for the worst and expect the best outcome. And I still live here today. Because this is my home
Much of damage from Katrina storm was not the storm itself but from the levies giving way. It was human preventable error. Authorities knew in advance that the levies would not hold up to a certain category storm and did nothing to take care of the problem beforehand. Plus the government reacted slowly once the levies broke. Stop blaming Katrina.
@@GCMickens You're talking about New Orleans. ywohipp2tripp is talking about the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The devastation there was from the hurricane's storm surge and wind. Katrina's storm surge in Mississippi was the most extensive and highest in recorded U.S. history. I grew up in southern Mississippi and was quite familiar with the Gulf Coast, and still have family down there. When I visited for Christmas after Katrina they took me to the coast (the parts that were accessible) and it was truly heart rending - it was as if a giant arm had swept everything into the ocean.
My thoughts go out to you -- lived in Ocean Springs and Pascagoula for a while, a few years after Katrina. We were in PCB during, I went out and played in the rain and watched the gigantic waves, it was a blast, but man...seeing the devastation in MS even a couple years later was something else. Nobody really talked about it much, either. I don't think I'll ever forget the marshes, full of dead trees from the storm. Spooky as hell. I hope y'all are doing better these days! Man, I wonder if Bozo's is still around...best burgers I've had in forever. Took me ten years to find another burger as good!
"Mother Nature has it in for you..." LMAO! And I'm an American who lives in Florida, where the Hurricane season has specific start and stop dates (and from where companies that sell generators get most of their income).
We're having another drought year in California. Some homeless guy hit me up for a dollar because the price of bottled water went up again. No seriously. The pantsless guy ACTUALLY took a gallon of water from the cooler at the Walgreens, paid for it, and went back to hide in the shade because it was 101(F) out .He ACTUALLY bought what he said he would with my dollar. Cool. (TBH, my "water" is ice brewed for a smooth taste😝)
If I recall correctly, Florida actually gets more tornadoes (or at least more per square mile) than Oklahoma. The difference is Florida doesn't get as many powerful tornadoes. Hurricanes AND tornadoes - that's crazy!
How are those start and stop dates working out for y'all? I know recently there was a year with three named storms before the start date (Is it July 1?).
Most Europeans will eventually miss Europe, at least most recent emigrants. The only recent emigrants that feel like they won the lottery by being in the USA are possibly south and Central American, Asians, Africans, and only if they were poor in their country.
I was born in Kansas and lived in most of the southern states. In 63rs I have been through (that I can remember) 4 minor earthquakes, 3 hurricanes, 1 blizzard (you left those out) and more tornados than I could even count. But one thing you have to remember about tornados is there is no 1 storm 1 twister rule. A single storm can produce 2,3 or several tornados as it moves. My response at this point in my life is to sit in the recliner and watch roku while my family hides in the bathroom with a mattress to cover them up. Something else you might want to include that I doubt Britain has are heat waves, where people literally die from getting too hot. I really enjoy your broadcasts. Keep up the good work.
While Nashville did get a nasty hit, the real tragedy was in a small city named Cookeville, about 80 miles east, with a death toll of about 18. That is the vast majority of the 25 deaths related to this most recent storm. And yeah, the 1906 quake was rough. However, the vast majority of the destruction and deaths wasn't due to the quake - directly - but from the fire that happened in the aftermath.
When the sky turns green and birds stop singing head for the SW corner the basement. I am from Indiana and have been in three earthquakes in the East, one very major tornado, several smaller tornadoes, three hurricanes and One blizzard.
@@ceciliag2929 Tornadoes are what did a lot of the damage in Hurricane Andrew. Tons of little F4s popping out of the clouds and razing my ex-father-in-law's boyhood neighborhood to the ground. The big storm and the broad winds get all of the sexy coverage, and storm surge often does the majority of the damage, but hurricanes spawn tornadoes within them.
I was a little kid in the 70s when a huge tornado destroyed the high school in my area of Indiana. I remember playing outside with my brothers and cousins when the sky turned a really freaky shade of green and it got really quiet. That's when my uncle rushed us all inside and crammed a bunch of scared and confused kids into an interior hallway because there was no basement.
I moved to America from a country with no earthquakes. To say that I was scared sh!tless because of the aftershocks from the Napa valley earthquake a few years ago is an understatement....
Here in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, there are too many hills and trees to see tornados coming. Because I’ve also lived in New Orleans, people ask me which I fear more: tornados or hurricanes? Definitely tornado-hardly any warning and nowhere to hide. With hurricanes, you usually get plenty of warning, just very expensive to “evacuate”.
Meanwhile I'm over here with earthquakes in Southern California. We finally have an app that might give us a few seconds of warning, depending on your distance from the epicenter. 😐
#Deborah Danielson, you must have never experienced being in the northeast quadrant eyewall of a big hurricane as it comes ashore. That part of a hurricane is full of tornadoes. (New Orleans doesn't usually get the brunt of the northeast quadrant full force because of geography.) I've been through almost every hurricane to hit coastal Mississippi since we moved here in 1993. Including Katrina. I grew up in southern Michigan, spent time in Kansas during summers, and was stationed in NM, the Philippines, and TX prior to relocating here. I've experienced tornadoes, hurricanes, smaller wildfires, plus earthquakes and typhoons while overseas. (Thankfully, we missed the eruptions of Mt Pinatubo by a year.) I love living here on the coast, but hurricanes are not easier to deal with than tornadoes by a long shot. And you don't always get days and days of time to prepare for a hurricane either. Plus, a tornado is usually (although not always) a relatively quick affair. I can think of several hurricanes that stalled out with the eyewall almost directly overhead. For over 12 hours. This isn't counting the hours of dreadful anticipation as a monster storm closes in on you, nor the time it takes for the beast to finally leave your area completely. And if you have a hooptie old car, try to evacuate, and it breaks down within an hour or two on the side of the road as you're evacuating? The reason people died in New Orleans is because they couldn't evacuate prior to the storm, and then the levees failed. There are public shelters, but they are a last resort thing for us; you have to bring supplies, which I have been told may possibly be confiscated by workers upon entering to share with those who couldn't be bothered to bring their own supplies. We had just finished building our own mostly underground shelter just prior to Katrina, and so did not have to leave. Not everyone has the luxury of evacuating for hurricanes. Some people cannot afford evacuation or don't own a vehicle, some have livestock or many pets which they can't just leave behind, and others have jobs which require them to stay (emergency response personnel, maintenance, infrastructure, hospital/care home staff, process workers, etc...). Then there can be the extended aftermath of a hurricane. The cleanup after Katrina took a year or more in a path over 100 miles wide and deep. Folks over a huge area were without power on average for a month, and some longer than that. Communications (cell and landlines) were down or spotty for weeks. No power for AC in the sweltering heat, with natural shade gone, becuse the trees left standing were all denuded. Plus having to try to sleep in that heat & high humidity, plus the horrible bugs getting in everywhere. In your time in New Orleans, did you ever experience a direct hit by a hurricane, ride it out, and have to endure a protracted aftermath? I'll take the tornado as the lesser weather problem, especially if you live in an area where most homes have basements, plus you can buy a weather alert radio, and most phones will give you alerts with enough lead time to seek shelter. And yes, I have experienced tornado warnings and actual tornadoes - in MI, OH, KS, NM, TX, (two very close calls while tent camping), and some non-hurricane related ones here in MS (one that flipped our chicken coop 70 yards from the house). Hurricanes/typhoons are no picnic, and you can't always leave.
I remember the one tornado I lived through in Tennessee. It came out of nowhere and just went by us in our car. Thankfully it was an F0 otherwise I'm sure we would have been tossed around 8'D
What, no love for sinkholes. While they aren't as flashy as earthquakes, there's nothing like the ground silently opening up and swallowing a car dealership with some nice sports cars or a couple lanes of I-4. I guess not deadly enough since I believe 4 people have ever been killed in Florida by sinkhole.
He probably left sinkholes out because Britain has them too? I had been expecting avalanches, but they do happen in Scotland. I guess that is why they aren't in the video either.
I live in CA and people are always saying "Oh, Gosh. You must be terrified of earthquakes!" and I reply, "No. I'm more terrified of the hundreds of wildfires we have each year and the endless droughts we have." The last three summers have been nothing but ash-fests. Gray skies and ash all over your car when you wake up in the morning. We had one fire in the Santa Cruz mountains last year that was less than 25 miles from us. Scary!
Funny that you brought up the word "side" when also mentioning Mt. St. Helens and exploding. That thing did not blow its top. No, it blew its side out!
To be fair, nothing short of an underground shelter or one of those (relatively) new above ground armored rooms is going to survive getting hit by an EF5 anyway. Might as well check it out- your outcome is almost certainly going to be the same regardless if you can't get in one of those places.
Any time I get tornado watch or warning alerts, I automatically go outside. My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy and refuses to spend more than a couple minutes outside with me. I tell him it’s fine, I know if/when a tornado is heading our way. He just side eyes me and walks back in the house. 😂
At first you annoyed me. Now I cannot miss an episode. I am often amazed at the amount of research you do relating to American history. A great deal of information you present is unknown to far too many Americans. Kudos to you, sir.
I've lived through 3 tornadoes. My roof was destroyed in one, my house was skipped over in the second while houses on either side were destroyed, the third damaged a storage building and thrust a fence post to completely through an oak tree. Mother Nature doesn't play around.
Hi, Lawrence. When I was in the Army in California, it must've been in 1979, I woke up with my bed in the middle of the room. I was confused because I didn't know how that could happen. Then I heard some of the men talking about the "terrible earthquake" last night - the one that I slept through. In 1980, again in the Army, this time in North Carolina, I was standing guard duty and I saw a tornado in the distance. Yes, it was in the distance, but I could see it coming closer and closer to me so I was rolling over in my mind how close I would let it get before I abandoned my post. Thankfully, the Captain of the Guard relieved me before I had to do that.
I've lived in Florida on the east coast for 52 years and have been through many hurricanes. And yes they are scary as hell. I have seen one tornado in all those years. It was a waterspout that came ashore while I was stopped at a traffic light. I was mesmerized. The sky was black, but the tornado was as white as snow. I watched until the green light, then I floored it out of there. No one was hurt, but a few oceanfront condos got minor damage.
On Florida's west coast I've seen numerous waterspouts practically every storm season. It's rare they make landfall to become true tornadoes, but one or two a year does happen...Last year had one tearing down a busy street, blowing a few transformers, & snapping a railroad crossing bar off. A few blocks went without power for a couple days with some injures, but I didn't hear about any deaths.
We had an odd RARE winter tornado touch down just east of Cleveland. It carved up our local public golf course. Knocked down five trees, bounced back up and dropped on ONE sole persons home, destroyed their house and the neighbors weren’t even touched. Our FD/PD and whole city came together to help this family. So rare to get them up by the Lake.
I was a youngster of 9 years old in 1969, and my father was in the Air Force, stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi when Hurricane Camille came to visit. It was also a category 5 hurricane, and did a LOT of damage. There was a big death toll that actually came down a bit as recovery efforts and research came into play. It turned out that there were a lot (don't recall at my now advanced age whether it was 10's or more than 100) bodies found that had been washed out of some of the above-ground graves in the area. I do recall seeing a lot of dead cattle, though, as well as more than one freighter washed ashore. We went to the airbase and sheltered in a fortified hangar, and alas, I slept through the entire height of the storm. It was fast moving and completely gone when we went home to (a semi-destroyed) rental property we lived in at the time. Oh, and EDIT - I have seen a couple of tornadoes. I am fascinated by them.
I heard about that storm. My dad was in junior high, and he told me of a story he heard about a party of "storm sitters" that thought it would be a good idea to have a sit-in at someone's house right on the beach. Considering how the house and the people inside it were never seen again, I imagine they came to regret that choice.
@@K9TheFirst1 It was actually a "Hurricane Party" held at a beach-side motel. After the storm, only the concrete foundation was left, and everyone in that building was killed. I think this is probably what you are referring to. [EDIT] Here's a link, but it is clearly bad OCR. But it is from the NY Times, at that time a reputable purveyor of news: www.nytimes.com/1977/09/18/archives/swept-away-swept-away.html Oh, and accounts vary on whether it was a motel or an apartment, but my memory says motel where a bunch of young folks had decided to have a party.
I was 3 years old then, and remember that the wind was so hard in Jackson that the traffic lights were horizontal. We went down to the coast in 73, and you could still see the devastation in parts of it.
@@badguy1481 I moved to the Mississippi gulf coast in 1970 from the Texas gulf coast. Spent my life dodging hurricanes along the gulf. Sometimes not so successfully. At least with hurricanes you know they're coming.
I grew up on Dallas, TX. I've seen the sky turn green, we did tornado drills in school. I had to move to North Carolina to experence one. When I called the city to complain that I didn't hear sirens before it happened, they told me we don't have tornado siren's because we don't have tornadoes . My neighbors crushed house begged to differ.
I too have seen the sky turn green when I lived in Florida. Preparing for various natural disasters is a fact of life here. That's not to say that they're common, but if you're smart, you'll keep a stocked bug out bag in your home and vehicle, and never let your vehicle drop below say, half a tank of fuel, in case of evacuation alerts.
It's true. No sirens down in NC. It was weird moving to Missouri and hearing them on a regular basis (routine testing). But in NC, I think they're only active for a few seconds, maybe a minute, whereas in the Midwest, in parts they can stay grounded (though rare) for up to half an hour. That's far worse, that much more terrifying.
When I was little, I was stuck in a car in a Walmart parking lot watching a tornado touchdown nearby. Luckily my dad got back in time and we left. About 2 or 3 minutes later and that tornado was over that parking lot. Fun times.
I was a little girl of 8 in 1964 when we went on a camping vacation driving from Ohio to Colorado and back. I don't remember the state but I do remember seeing the tornado funnel heading towards us. My dad put the pedal to the metal and our 63 Ford Falcon hit it's top speed limit. That was a great vacation! First encounter with tornado, rattle snakes, and bears oh my!
I'm suprised that you didn't mention that your former home, Indiana, is about as prone to large tornados as Kansas is. Re: earthquakes. Some of the strongest earthquakes in history were the New Madrid quakes, which actualy altered the course of the Mississippi River. Some of them exceded eight on the Richter Scale. They occoured in 1811 and 1812. Most of Yellowstone National Park is the caldera of an enormous active volcano.
When I was a child we lived in Oklahoma where we lived trough several tornadoes. As a teen we lived in Texas where I experienced multiple hurricanes. Now I’m an Alaskan and here I’ve experienced ash fall from a volcano, many earthquakes (including that big one about a year and a half ago), and in years we don’t get much snow, the lack of an ice pack melting in spring makes the whole state burn. Some years the fire map makes it look like the entire state is on fire. But Alaska has so many ways it can kill you, but it’s worth the risk to exist here. Also, you can die at anytime anywhere so it’s best to just be where you want to be.
@SWeRP Hurricane Tracking I lived there in the 70s, 80s, 90s, to the early 00s, before Mother Nature went full-on mental so snow happened lightly with years apart back then. I also lived mostly in central to southern Texas, far from where tornados were known to be. In fact, Waco was hit with a massive tornado in the 50s I believe, and it *SHOCKED* the Waco population because they were under the impression Waco would *never* get a tornado. The droughts in all too familiar with. For a while I lived in San Antonio, situated on the edge of the hill country and the desert so it had an insane identity crisis. You would have like 9 months of like no rain, but with all the creeks you still had obscene humidity! The last Christmas I spent in San Antonio I called time and temperature around midnight and it was like 85 degrees and 90% humidity. Gawd I hated living in San Antonio! You could step fresh out of the shower, dress in perfectly clean clothes, open your door and between the oppressive heat and the inescapable humidity you would be DRENCHED in sweat by the time you make it to the car. I’ve moved over 30 times in my life and I’ve lived coast to coast, and I can easily say what keeps me from wanting to return to Texas is the regular oppressive heat married to humidity that is constant is the thing that keeping me from ever wanting to go back there, not it’s hurricanes and tornados. I don’t consider droughts because growing up there drought was just natural part of yearly Texan hell cycle, you always expect it and always mentally crucify the assholes starting massive fires flicking their cigarettes out of cars. As for the severe winter storms, we created climate change and Mother Nature is kicking our asses as a response. Maybe if Texas can get some representation interested in building a solid infrastructure, they would have a power grid built that doesn’t freak out and die when it gets a little cold out. But who am I kidding? Thats silly thought and will never happen. Keeping chains in the car to throw on your tires to drive safely and winter storms aren’t that bad (speaking as an Alaskan so I know a thing or two about winter storms and traveling after they hit). We can always tell when someone has moved here from a southern state because they drive like a terrified grandma in icy conditions the rest of us have learned how to drive normally. It’s frustrating to see because they drive so slowly in their ignorance thinking they are driving safely, they are actually a hindrance to traffic making driving conditions worse. There are ways to safely travel in severe winter conditions, you just have to learn them then get the confidence to drive with your knowledge, not letting fear of the ice turn you into a danger for others.
2:14 ACTUALLY!! One of the HIGHEST ranking earthquakes to be RECORDED happened in Alaska on March 27, 1964 in Prince William Sound at a crazy magnitude of 9.2!!!
And wasn't it followed by a tsunamis along the West Coast and Hawaii? (He didn't talk about tsunamis at all - Great Britain hasn't had one since the 1700's.
I remember that earthquake. In fact, National Georaphic did an article on it and I kept it in a scrapbook for years. Had a picture of a woman holding onto the edge of a crevasse that opened into the earth.
Really the biggest earthquake took place in the chilean city of Valdivia in 1960 with a 9,5 scale and a Tsunami. They have to up the scale for that magnitude...
I’ve said similar myself: the US has HUGE weather compared to Europe in general (though it seems that climate change is starting to mess with the weather over there). As a Midwesterner I’m obligated to go out on the porch & stare at the sky whenever there’s a tornado warning, instead of actually seeking shelter, & I’ve seen some massive awesome terrifying clouds. Also your countryman Neil Gaiman said as an Englishman he only *thought* he knew what winter was before he moved to Minnesota 😊.
They said there was ash in the stratosphere that circled the globe from Mt. Saint Helen. The cap on that volcano is growing 10 feet a year. It's probably going to blow again in the next century or two.
The 1900 hurricane that struck Galveston was a straight-up horror show. Imagine all of the worst possible things that can come from a Hurricane -- floods, destruction, death -- and Galveston suffered it 1000 times worse than what you can imagine.
There is a great book written by Erik Larson called Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. All about the Galveston Hurricane.
I’ve grew up not far from the fault line on the Illinois side of the Mississippi in the town next to one destroyed by the TriState tornado in 1925. We got to have both tornado and earthquake drills in school as a result. The New Madrid quakes in 1811/1812 are estimated to be in 7-8 range, and school drills always included that we probably were due for another big one sometime “soon” geologically speaking.
Yup, biggest by far. He missed out on blizzards as well. A few other noteworthy and historically devastating cat 5"s such as New York's big one that killed thousands and moved the coastline back a fair piece and Agnus of the early 70's and even Andrew that recorded the highest sustained wind, above 200mph. Wildfire that hit western Montana a decade or so ago burned an area half the size of the UK. In any given year the death toll from tornadoes in the US beat the entire lifetime of Britain. No need to worry about Yellowstone though. If it goes, he'll be buried in ash with the rest of us.
You should read up on the tornado that struck Greensburg KS and almost wiped the entire town off the map! It was an EF-5 and a MILE wide! My grandma/ grandpa and uncle all lived there when it happened. It was a VERY scary night until we knew they were all ok. There were not many casualties, but alot of people (my family included) lost everything. It happened on May 4, 2007.
I live in North Carolina. The only earthquake I ever experienced was 9 years ago. It was more like a train going by than what you see in the movies. Honestly, it just rattled the pictures on the wall. I didn’t even realize what had happened until later. We’ve also had wildfire smoke all the way from Florida. I’ve been to Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Rainier. Also, I’ve never seen a tornado before either.
@Rachel P I remember that too. My daughter and I thought it was a semi truck that was shaking the ground, but we live in Johnston Co, not Wake Co. When we heard it was an earthquake we were like WHAT??? Although there is a fault line running up through North and South Carolina, I don't think many people realize it. The earthquake in Charleston was a big deal in 1886, and you can see the bolts in the historic houses because of it.
And the quakes. And those thunderstorms are nightmares. I always thought I liked watching a good summer thunderstorm here in Idaho. But the ones in OK... they're like living through a bombing raid.
Odd how some areas are hit more. I haven't seen a tornado since I moved to the SE corner of Dallas; my old neighborhood got torn up again last year, NW (and north central, a cluster simultaneously). 0
There's an area a few miles away from me where it just seems like tornadoes land every year, and they make their way in my direction. Last year that area had twin tornadoes touch down, but luckily they dissipated fairly quickly.. For as much as they touch down near me, I wish I had a shelter. Luck always runs out sooner or later.
The closest tornado I've been to was I was staying at my moms friends house in Florida and I went on the back patio with her son to watch the rain rolling in. The friend lived on 20 acres and I saw a thing touchdown on the ground and I look at the son. I only got the words is that.... he yelled RUN!!!! We hid in a tiny 1/2 bath. We had 3 adults, 2 children, a green wing macaw, and 3 flipping large dogs in there. After 45 minutes we came out and the path that it took was down the pasture and into the woods. We were very lucky.
@@amymason6234 no shit a half bath is just a sink and toliet. That's why it's called a half bath 🤦♀️. Not all half baths are the size of a closet. My friend made her half bath capable to fit an electric wheelchair. Her husband was in an electric wheelchair for the last 6 months of his life. They made sure that when they built their house her husband could get into all bathrooms. My 1/2 bath is also gigantic. My 1/2 bath doorway isn't capable of fitting a full size wheelchair, but you can easily cut the doorway to fit a full size wheelchair if need be. Once this happens you are capable of taking a full size wheelchair into there. My brother is adding a 1/2 bath to his house and it's going to be able to fit an electric wheelchair. You can't make a blanket statement like you did. People design their homes to the way they like it a lot of times.
These Lost in the Pond videos are really interesting. I lived decades in Kansas and never once encountered a tornado. Topeka and Wichita used to have alot, especially in Spring. My town never had even one, of which I was always thankful. I have never encountered a tornado while being elsewhere, either.
I know I'm several months late to this video so I don't know if you'll see this, but my hometown was actually completely destroyed by a wildfire in California in late 2018. The Camp Fire, as it came to be called because of the area where it started and not because anyone was camping, destroyed 95% of all structures and displaced almost 50,00 people from the total area the fire covered. My family's home burned down but thankfully everyone happened to be out of town at the time. Other friends of mine were not so lucky, and had narrow escapes during the gridlocked evacuation. It was a traumatizing event for all and the area still looked like a war zone when I went back many months later. Fires like that are likely to only become more common in California in coming years. It's sad to see so many beloved places I grew up with literally turning to ash before my eyes. In the future, our species is going to have to get better at both controlling climate change and safeguarding against disaster in the construction, planning, and management of inhabited areas. Anyway great video, you're awesome!
In 2011 in Joplin missouri, there were multiple tornados that began rotating around one another, which lead to a 1 mile wide tornado forming around them.
I grew up there and went to college at MSSC ( now MSSU) before moving overseas. I was walking out of my job and looked up at the giant TV screen one of the buildings had on its side and saw what looked like I expect a nuclear bomb strike would look like. Then, I saw the crawl at the botom of the screen about the Joplin Tornadow. I spent the next 5 hours calling everybody I could think of to see if they were ok. Luckily my Mom and Sister were safe and so were my friends.
The Joplin tornado was heart wrenching to see. The devastation was huge. Joplin has two large hospitals. One was demolished. Half the town was razed as if a bomb had landed and taken the houses away. While the houses have been rebuilt, the trees are gone and the charm of the neighborhoods is missing. Fortunately the high school held its graduation elsewhere so the students weren't there when the school was demolished. President Obama visited Joplin after that tornado and it was reported on the major morning news programs. I'm tired of tornadoes. I've lost friends in them and they have come too close as well as come on site (minor and not significant damage). The Joplin tornado has numerous videos on TH-cam if you want to see and learn about it. It was one of the most destructive tornadoes in U.S. history.
I watched the chase start to end, the storm was not multiple tornados converging, it was it's own type called a multi-vortex that formed before the main event died after the RFD broke it away from the parent updraft, then we have our main infamous storm on cycle number 2.
As a Hoosier, I'm comforted to know that when you lived here, you were never one of those idiots who stood out on their porch watching/filming an oncoming tornado. I've lived through several of them, most notably the 1965 Palm Sunday Outbreak, May 1974 (was in a car driving swiftly when a tornado formed a few miles behind us, and most recently, September 2002 when my apartment sustained little damage but a house across the street had it's entire roof torn off.
I'm in California, so, duh, yeah, I've experienced lots of earthquakes. The personal worst for me was the Whittier Narrows quake (I think they might have renamed it later). It was only a 5.9 or 6.0, but I was at work, and the building essentially sat right on the epicenter. We evacuated the building, and while we were standing in the parking lot, several aftershocks hit. It's the only time I've been standing on the ground and felt the ground -- literally -- bounce under my feet.
I lived in Portland for 11 years which is up North of California but Portland is about the same earthquake-wise as Los Angeles. I've felt a few Earthquakes, but most of the time it was the dog would flip out or the toilet would make weird noise or the furniture would start squeaking
It might be surprising, but we also get earthquakes occasionally here in the Midwest. Here in Iowa I can remember two happening in the last 20 years, both quite light but noticeable. Before I was born, my mom experienced a stronger one near Davenport Iowa. It caused her to hurt her knees because the sudden shaking drove her leg first into the ground as she tried to stay stable. Then she heard screaming and rushed outside to find that her neighbor had been on a ladder cleaning her gutters, and as the ladder had swayed, she had grabbed the only thing available to stop from falling to the ground, that being a set of power cables running to her roof. My mom had to get a pair of rubber gloves and push her neighbor's ladder back against the roof, because the woman was acting as a grounded current and couldn't be touched. Later the quake made the news, though it was revealed that it mostly was felt by the Mississippi River where the ground was more porous and thus the shaking carried significantly farther. Major earthquakes only happen in this area about once every 300 years.
I've been in a few myself as a native Californian. I have only seen an earthquake once in my life. During Northridge it cracked my house and the neighboring town (Fillmore) had tremendous damage (especially downtown). The next day we drove to Ventura and we were waiting in the car to get someone and an aftershock (about 5.6 I think) hit and we sat in the car watching it. The road looked like swells of ocean water rising and falling and the windows in the store fronts were flexing in and out (I thought they would break, but they didn't). And the street lights or maybe it was telephone poles were swaying back and forth. And the weirdest thing I saw were 3 phone booths in a Greyhound bus station parking lot all rising and falling with the earth, It looked like when people do the "wave" at a baseball game, each phone booth would rise up and then the one after it would rise a split second after. It was surreal watching all this. No one was out really and we were the only ones sitting there, it felt very apocalyptic. lol
@@Belegalorleave Alaska gets some huge earthquakes. I remember they had something like a 9.0 back in the 80's or 70's. But the areas were more remote so the damage wasn't as bad as when you have ones like we do in California in cities. If Alaska ever starts building more cities that country wouldn't tolerate it and would flatten them! lol Alaska is gonna stay wild forever.
America has the best meteorology schools in the world because it also has the most intense weather in the world. Death Valley is one of the top three hottest places in the world, we get hit by major hurricanes, we have literally ten times more tornadoes in the world than any other country, our blizzards are insane...about the only categories we're routinely beaten in are drought and monsoon flood. The "big one" that everyone in California is worried about isn't even the largest earthquake North America can experience. Our largest earthquake was the 1964 Alaska Good Friday quake, clocking in at 9.2. It was a megathrust earthquake, meaning it was the same type that can potentially strike the Pacific Northwest at any moment. It triggered landslide tsunamis with extreme runups that struck while the ground was still shaking, and a trans-oceanic tsunami that impacted the entire Pacific basin. The plate boundaries that produce such earthquakes also generally produce the most explosive volcanoes. With the exception of places like Yellowstone.
I'm from a high temp/high humidity area, and I remember standing in Death Valley in the 120s, scoffing, "Whadya mean 'hot'? This ain't hot! Feels like it's in the 80s, man!" not realizing I was sweating out every drop of water my body possessed.
@@mythdefied9070 Yep, I grew up in Fla and the HUMIDITY was oppressive, and I worked outdoors. Went to Colo and almost fainted from dehydration, I didn't feel hot, but the water was leaving, but I didn't notice because I was NOT seeing/feeling sweat cause it evaporated off me very quickly. I found a garden hose quickly and learned my lesson about places with very low humidity and heat. whew
I’ve been through tornadoes in Missouri and Texas, earthquakes in California and Missouri, and hurricanes in Maryland. You live with it and don’t dwell on it. I just make sure any house we live in has a basement or storm shelter. BTW-love your “Memos”.
What annoys me is when the emergency sirens are abused. Ours goes off not only for air raid alerts and tornado alerts. But also 7am, 11:00am, 12:00pm & 4pm Monday through Friday. Plus when ever an ambulance or firetruck is needed. (Volunteer Fire Department) The only way I know it's an actual tornado alert is if after several minutes the siren hasn't stopped. (It normally takes a few minutes for the volunteers to get to the fire department.)
@@LincolnRon Jesus Christ, that's a waste of time. We have a single test every second Wednesday of the month and than it never gets touched unless a tornado hits.
I was at a church camp in 1972 when hurricane Agnes came through Maryland. We were stuck there for 4 extra days. The result was a lot of spaghetti eating, plenty of strange games and two pregnant 16 year olds. People will find something to do.
Born and raised in Tornado Alley. I can feel it in the air early in the day. Makes my skin tingle. When our kids were growing up and we had watches and warnings I'd just drag their mattresses into our back hall, shut all the bedroom doors and they would just sleep there. I kept watch on great local weather channel and radar until it all blew through. If it was still light outside I loved sitting on the porch watching the storms move through. I love a good storm!!
I’ve lived through so many hurricanes I’ve lost count. There have been tornadoes, snowmageddons and an earthquake in 2010, I believe. And that all happened in suburban Philadelphia, Pa. I guess I’m a crazy weather veteran.
A couple years ago I was driving through southeastern Colorado and an EF4 twister hit nearby. It was maybe a couple miles south of me, but it was so big that it nearly filled the whole horizon. As there was no place to take any shelter, I just kept driving. Definitely an experience I'll never forget.
From Texas: Tornado warnings are an annual occurrence here, and I've personally had 7 close encounters including one that put our family car in a tree. Edit: I included the stories in a reply below.
In more detail: When I was a little kid, a tornado hit our apartment complex. Our apartment was undamaged, but the apartment building across the parking lot was missing a chunk of its roof, and I got to watch our car fall out of the tree it was in. It went on to take the roof off of an Albertson's grocery store.[EF3] A year later, a tornado touched down next to us while we were driving and was traveling parallel to a couple hundred yards away. We quickly turned around and went the other direction. [It looked like an EF1; I don't remember if I ever heard the official report on it.] A few years later, a twin vortex tornado touched down within our neighborhood. It was barreling down our street heading directly toward us. Two blocks down, it took a sudden left turn, and missed us. [EF2] A year after that, a particularly wide tornado stalled on top of my elementary school while we were in class. [EF2] About a decade later, a tornado destroyed the windshield of my mother's van while we were sleeping. It was parked in our very short driveway. The house was undamaged aside from a damaged fence and a few missing shingles.[EF1] A couple years later, we were driving near Houston, on the more inland side, when it was hit by a hurricane. The intent was to make a retreat from the vulnerable area. Just as urbanization turned to fields, a total of three weak looking tornadoes touched down all in different directions surrounding us. Thankfully, none of them hit us, but my mother was notably shaken. Last year, a tornado approached my apartment. I watched it pass by about 4-5 blocks away from my apartment balcony. [EF2]
@@AnasatisTiMiniatis We had one jump over our house when Gilbert came through, and we didn't even know it. We only became aware when we realized all the pets were huddled together in the back of a bedroom closet. These animals basically hated each other normally, so it was quite an eye-opener to find them there and realize what must have happened. The tornado itself was so huge you couldn't really distinguish a proper funnel cloud, so it looked like it was just a really low bank of clouds. But it tore up the airport nearby and wrecked a lot of private planes that had been stored there to protect them from the storm surge on the coast.
@A.A.Ron Davis imagine dust being driven under every door and window. And not just a little bit; drifts of it. Imagine going out in the yard to remove debris from your property from upwind structures that have been destroyed. Imagine having the doors literally blown out of their frames in the middle of the night. Yeah, the wind in Colorado can be rather more than "annoying."
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 89 | คู่เอก "ยอดไอคิว vs คิริลล์"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Z3vYkHJ_5Ig/mqdefault.jpg)
When picking a place to live in America, you also have to pick the disaster you want to endure.
Never has a truer statement been made. In N.J. we get hurricane's and the rere blizzard.
Snake River plain in Idaho. Other than a small fire here and there its fantastically low every other disaster.
Until Yellowstone goes kablooie.
Why I don't live in California...
I live in coastal Southern California and I do love it but GodDAMN if there aren't a few tradeoffs hahaha
@@irritated888 also didn't y'all just have an earthquake
Advice: if you buy a home in the Midwest, don't buy one without a basement.
In lots of places, the water table is too high for basements. You'd probably want to invest in a tornado shelter.
If it's made of brick or stone, you should be fine even without a basement.
Or a second storie cuz that 1st floor door is going to get barried in snow once Mother Nature comes in April to tell you winter isn't over yet
I grew up in a home without a basement in Kansas. We had to go to a community shelter whenever the sirens went off. It sort of gave me weather PTSD. I live in New Mexico now, where it's a bit windy in the spring and the summers have violent monsoon rains. I basically freak the F out, even though there aren't tornados here. It's just unnerving. I'm getting used to it little by little though.
Dont get a basement or a crappy tornado shelter go all out and get a nuclear shelter.
"Tornados don't happen every day"
Oklahoma: "allow us to introduce ourselves"
Lol - as an Oklahoman I can definitely say sometimes it feels like that!
May of last year in the tulsa area we were getting multiple tornadoes a day for nearly a month.
Not EVERYDAY thank you very much. They take a day off every now and then #livein405
Oklahomans: "hold my beer"
I lived in Oklahoma when I was young and then moved to Alabama. Tornadoes are as common to me as wins in football. 😎
Greetings. I'm a native North Dakotan, presently an old man living in a more temperate region. Growing up I lived through many blizzards which have to be experienced to be believed. Anyway you asked about tornado stories. I was 16 years old and was sitting on the front porch of my home as a storm roared into town. My dad came to the doorway to suggest I go into the basement. I looked up into the pitch black sky ready to make a snide teenager statement when a barrage of lightning lit the world and revealed a tornado going by me about 50 yards away and going about 50 mph. It is an event I've never forgotten. Mostly in those years I saw the sad aftermath of their passage. Have a good day.
Wow. We almost never actually get one here in western ( Dunn co. ) WI, but serious watches most summers. But a deadly one happened when my dad was young, a man about his age I grew up knowing, a fellow local dairy farmer, lost his parents & baby brother to a silo going down on top of them. More recently, and strangely enough while I was living in northern IL for a few years, where they get more actual tornadoes more often, there was one not too far from my home town area back home. But while we have nearly as bad of winter weather, the severe cold etc. here, we don't have it quite as bad as ND ( would here all the temps etc. when listening to the weather radio carefully, on the farm ).
@@ajb.822 The whole northern stretch from Idaho through to New York has one variation of another of the weather that looks good on Hallmark cards but otherwise has to be lived through to be believed. The Derecho that blasted Iowa last August brought back big memories for me, boy howdy.
Whoa! If that would happen today, the teenager wouldn't seek cover until he had taken a vid of it.
wow. I would have probably needed a clean pair of pants after that. I Live in NC and have been very luck to have gone through a tornado (knock on wood) they have hit around where I live but have never personally affected me before.
@@moviegirl1100 I pray that you always remain safe from such catastrophes. The one I witnessed did a great amount of damage.
Fun little note: As a Kansan, we will sit out on the front porch watching a tornado until it's about 5 houses down from us.
Move to Oklahoma, we don't worry till it's knocking at the door.
I'm from South Carolina and when I was stationed in Georgia, my fellow navy southern guys and I would get out the grill any time a hurricane would come.
My dad would go outside, put his hands on his hips, look up, sniff the air and say “tornado’s coming”
The_SCP _Foundation lol my grandma would always tell by looking at the clouds so I’m more than willing to bet he was doing the same but was convincing you all it was his nose just cuz he was a cheeky little shit. Lol he sounds like a great guy or at the very least a hilarious one :)
As a Kansan myself, I personally never seen a tornado, even though we had a few close calls. That Joplin tornado came close though.
As a child, I lived on a farm in the Midwest. We were on a party line. After tornadoes, the party line would be abuzz. "I have the top to somebody's silo here, and a shaggy brown dog. Anyone seen my mailbox or patio table?" I loved the adventure of checking the fields and ponds for our neighbors' missing items.
6) Americans with assault rifles!
This raises my curiosity. What is the best story you have from these little adventures
The stuggle:
If you live in tornado ally- build your house low and have a basement
If you live in a flood zone- put everything on stilts and basement is a bad idea
If you live in both at the same time- suffer
A houseboat in a hole in the ground.
*alley
I can't imagine living off ground level, like I used to have a 3rd floor bedroom when my family lived near DC but now? A ranch style manner house is enough altho I do currently live in a 3rd floor flat so I guess I'm back up here
If you live in both at the same time, pretend you're in Miami and build a concrete house on concrete stilts
The struggle is real. Make sure you keep your most precious possessions in air tight containers. Unless they are things that need air. Have about 500 emergency plans. Oh yeah. Label everything in weather proof ink and then add about 4 layers of clear duct tape to make sure the weather doesn’t actually erase it.
A couple of thoughts. The largest earthquake actually occurred in New Madrid, Missouri in the early 1800's. Alaska also gets some very strong quakes, close to 9.0. Also a hurricane doesn't have to be a category 5 to be bad. Even a "mere" tropical storm can be devastating.
Alaska suffered the 2nd largest earthquake in history after the Chile earthquake of 1960, a magnitude 9.5. On Good Friday, 1964, Alaska experienced a magnitude 9.2 quake resulting in wide spread destruction and very large tsunami that killed people in Hawaii, Japan and California to name a few locations where tsunami came ashore. The quake lasted 5 minutes.
That quake caused the Mississippi to flow backwards temporarily, or is supposed to have.
Deep Dive did an excellent half-hour video on that named "Why Earthquakes in the East are so much more Dangerous". While I still HIGHLY recommend people watch it, the TL;DR for the title is that the underlying rock is much more solid, which causes the energy to transmit much further and more strongly and absorb and dissipate less. (i.e. The bedrock behaves more like a ringing bell and less like something that makes a thudding or thwacking noise when hit.)
I live in East Texas and have experienced two tornadoes up close. Definitely a good way to get your attention! 😉👍🏻🇺🇲
@@williamscoggin1509 Funny thing is, a lot of people don't realize Tornado Alley extends up into Canada and we get the second-most in the world. If I'm reading the numbers right, we get about the same occurrence per square mile/km... we just have less absolute land area that's part of Tornado Alley.
West cost: earthquakes
Mid west: big tornadoes
East coast: hurricanes
The south: *shrugs* a little bit of everything
Washington gets earthquakes, occasional tornadoes, occasional cyclones and we have several of the most dangerous volcanos in the world.
In other words, Californians go back, it's far more dangerous up here. Perhaps you should go somewhere safe like Oregon.
The south has the worst of them all: humidity
@@24framedavinci39
As someone from Arkansas, I can also agree. 😀
@@24framedavinci39 as someone from North Texas, I can agree with that!
Facts lol
Growing up in Ohio, we did tornado drills as often as fire drills, and actually had to put it into practice a couple times.
I'm also from Ohio and old enough to remember when they used to make us open the classroom windows during drills to, "equalize the pressure". One of the many silly myths we used to believe about tornadoes!
Ohio here as well! Trumbull county.
Vince P When I lived in Brisbane, Australia as an exchange student in 87-88, I was at school one day and the sky turned green. I told my teacher I was getting out of there (a 2nd floor room with 3 walls of windows) because a tornado was coming. I was told I was crazy, they don't have tornadoes there. I responded, Iam not crazy. I have seen a green sky twice in my life, and twice tornadoes ripped through the town. Not long after we were all told we had to stay (it was time to go home from school). My teacher wanted to put us in this porch area below the classroom that was open. I said no way in hell was I going there, either. I said I am going to go sit in that field over there. My teacher told me, that was stupid, I would be right out in the open. I said it beats under here. This is going to create w wind tunnel and makes the winds even stronger. I said laying down in s field is safer. Well my teacher and 7 of my friends went with me. Then the sky turned blue again and everything was ok. My teacher told us the next day, a cyclone had hit Paupa New Guinea and that was the reason it looked like there was going to be a tornado. The teacher wanted to know how I knew the fieldwould be safer, I told her I spent alot of time in the hallways at schoo, sitting on the floor with my head between my knees and while we were all practicing for a tornado they also told us what to do if a basement with no windows, bathroom with no windows, or a hallway with no windows was not available to us. The internet was just beginning to become available, so she did research the old fashioned way, in a library, and found out I was right. I told her, they could have suspended me for being sassy to a teacher, but there was no way I was going to sit in the classroom, or in that area under the classroom no matter what. What I had been told todo my entire life contradicted what I was being told to do.
From the O also and yep I think once a month we did drills for fire and tornados
I’m from Dayton Ohio. We had 15 tornadoes last Memorial Day two F-5’s went right over my house. They actually aren’t that rare lol.
Well, when your nation encompasses so much land, and particularly so many climates and varying terrain, these things happen.
That's our attitude, but I was surprised to learn that our weather is more extreme than most. Our area explains the sheer number of storms, but not their strength.
@@kathryngeeslin9509 it's geography; warm gulf of Mexico water, turbulent air coming over the Rockies to suck the warm gulf air up into the plains, where the colder turbulent air and the warm wet air mix, then nice flat prairies to act as a nice thermal sink to produce columns of rising air... And not a land feature to be seen to break up the tracks of the storms.
Perfect blender for creating titanic thunder cells.
I used to spend afternoons watching the cells build and grow; rows and columns of massive anvilheads, marching across the sky like soldiers at parade.
@@lairdcummings9092 Brings to mind this, "Missouri has a continental type of climate marked by strong seasonality. In winter, dry-cold air masses, unchallenged by any topographic barriers, periodically swing south from the northern plains and Canada. If they invade, reasonably humid air, snowfall and rainfall result. In summer, moist, warm air masses, equally unchallenged by topographic barriers, swing north from the Gulf of Mexico and can produce copious amounts of rain, either by fronts or by convectional processes. In some summers, high pressure stagnates over Missouri, creating extended droughty periods. Spring and fall are transitional seasons when abrupt changes in temperature and precipitation may occur due to successive, fast-moving fronts separating contrasting air masses."
--> I would not have guessed that last bit about rainfall, "All of Missouri experiences "extreme" climate events, and such events must be considered part of the normal climate. Though infrequent in occurrence and often very geographically restricted, these �disturbances� produce environmental changes that may not otherwise have happened and that may be relatively long lasting in their effect. Among these extreme climatic events are high-intensity rains, protracted drought, heat waves and cold waves, ice storms, windstorms, and tornadoes. These climatic events, in turn, may lead to other environmental disturbances such as floods, fires, landslides, and abrupt changes in plant and animal populations and distributions. High-intensity precipitation characterizes all regions of Missouri. The town of Holt in northwestern Missouri holds the world record for a high-intensity rain, having received 12 inches within a 42-minute period on June 22, 1947."
Source: Climate of Missouri, Wayne L. Decker Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri
I’m from New England, I was actually working while a tornado tore through Springfield Massachusetts and legit watched it go by as a woman in front of me tried to order a sandwich and couldn’t understand why I was closing
I'm from S. Illinois when I was in first grade out school had a skylight. I literally watched a tornado from directly above me through it tornados are crazy.
My sister lived in Westfield at that time. It lifted two streets away from her house and set down two streets later... phew!
I grew up on the Massachusetts north shore. That tornado really fucked me up. I have relatives that live just outside Springfield - so i was worried abouth them - and even over here, north of Boston, the sky and calm before it hit was incredibly ominous. I was already in my 20s then but I LOVED the Wizard of Oz movie as a kid and was always told growing up that Massachusetts couldn't get tornadoes because of the terrain (that part of the movie TERRIFIED me). It was extremely hard to comprehend that we had an F3 hit....
@benjaminmorris4962
Or completely famished.
" Mother nature has it in for you".... Nearly made me spit out my coffee! Great line....
Mountain dew burns coming out the nostrils. That line killed me.
Mother Nature brought you into this world and she can take you out.
San Franciso earthquake was bad. However there was a series of earthquakes that happened 1811 -1812 called the New Madrid earthquakes. They took place in Illinois and Misouri. They were so violent that the Missippi River flowed backwards for 3 days, created an island in the river, and communities were completely wiped out. Experts have said were suppose to have another.
I was checking to see if someone wrote about those earthquakes. They had 7 between 6.0 and 7.5 magnitude. It was a blessing that the area wasn't populated like it is now. Since the rocks in the eastern United States have few active faults to interrupt the propagation of seismic waves, ground vibrations from earthquakes generated in the region may travel thousands of miles. Shortly after the earthquake began, ground shaking was felt as far away as Canada in the north and the Gulf Coast in the south. Eyewitness accounts noted that the shaking rang church bells as far away as Boston, Massachusetts, and brought down chimneys in Cincinnati, Ohio, about 360 miles away.
The Alaska quake, recently upgraded to 9. on the Richter scale.
Iowa's only island is on the Mississippi, it's called Sabula.
The little town I remember living in in Southern Illinois has flood gates in case the New Mad-rid ever gets angry again. There's a rest stop on 55 that does a really good job of showing where the the fault line is and what happened in the 1800's.
It's very interesting reading the accounts of the settlers about that series of quakes. The people slept outside, in the winter, for more than a month because the ground didn't stop shaking in between the second and third quake.
I was 3 years old and living in Washington state when Mount St. Helens erupted. I remember asking my parents why it was dark (at about 2 pm) and later why it was snowing (watching the ash fall outside). They told me about the eruption, but it didn't really make sense at the time. We have home movies of my dad sweeping ash off the roof of his shop. And as he cut his hay crop, ash billowed up behind the swather. He had to sharpen the blades on the swather after every pass down the field because the ash dulled them so quickly. Amazing!
In "80 my car was repainted & it was supposed to be sanded before the clearcoat put on. Instead, my hubby and I drove it to Seattle for a long wk-end then back to Idaho.
When we got back & washed off the thick coat of ash, the rough coat of paint felt like glass. No one could have polished it smoother.
It was an amazing surprise.
I was less than 70 miles from it when she popped.
It was incredible to me , as the year before I was on top of it staring at the vent.
We're all still waiting for Rainier
I was in high school when it blew. We lived in Lake Tapps, about 30 minutes east of Tacoma, up on the hill. Was a Sunday morning, and we were getting ready for church. Heard a muffled *WHUMP* and my mom said "I think the mountain blew!" My dad scoffed and insisted that it was maybe a car accident, or maybe just something falling over. We got to church and everyone was abuzz with news oh the eruption. Ha, Dad!
We didn't really get any ash, but Eastern WA did, the Toutle valley, and the Portland metro area. Quite a few people still have jars of ash that they collected.
You must have lived in Eastern Washington.
Volcanic ash is basically sand and aerated glass (pumice). It’s been used for millennia as a smoothing/sanding compound.
My mother was born and raised in Texas she used to tell stories about the quirky behaviors of tornadoes. She once told me a story about a tornado that destroyed a house and left an infant untouched in its crib. Once an F3 tornado went past our house no more than an eighth of a mile away. I slept through it and only noticed the damage in the morning on my way to work.
Once, a friend of mine woke up in the morning to find his roof was missing, and the night sky was seen above.
lol. grew up in southern wv and fell asleep one night to thunderstorms. apparently there was a tornado and everyone but me woke up. it was a mountaintop city and the tornado jumped over it. of course, it came down on a trailer park
My father, born into the a Great Depression in September 1929, told me that, when he was a small child, a tornado passed over the shack that they were living in at the time.
His older brother was asleep in the bed and the roof was pulled off of the house. The water was coming down in buckets, but my uncle slept through it all 🙄
I saw a picture online of a house that had been leveled except part of the bathroom. A boy had survived the huge tornado uninjured by holding onto the toilet. Tornadoes are capricious, and sometimes that works in favor of the survivors.
Wait till he learns that Yellowstone is a supervolcano that is overdue for an eruption...
Or that one of the worst fault lines runs through St. Louis and the last time it went off in the 1850's the Mississippi River backwards.
It's not "overdue." Stop listening to sensationalist bullshit.
@@filthycasual8187 I grew up in St Louis, New Madrid has been thought to be over due for some time.
Yeah, but us living in the US, particularly my Idahoan bum, we'll be the lucky ones dying quickly. Instead of slowly due to volcanic induced global winter for 2 to 3 years. In short, everyone on earth will be screwed if and when the caldera event happens.
oh we are so f*cked when it does
When I was a kid in Iowa, back in the 1970s, my dad would get drunk, make popcorn & BBQ on the front porch in anticipation of the approaching tornado.
My mother would huddle us all into the basement with a battery operated radio, some candles & matches and some large tins of reserve water.
The kids would sit back, listen to the radio, eat snacks and watch my mother panic and scream obscenities to my dad upstairs.
Ah, the good old times.
Are we related? (see my comment above)
Tornadoes aren't that predictable and they don't last very long.
Growing up in Tennessee, we'd argue with my Dad as kids about wanting to sit outside with him to watch the tornados. You could say he wanted to protect us, but I know the truth; he just wanted to ruin our fun. :p
@@SpicyTexan64 They're not, but the storms that produce tornadoes are.
@@leadpaintchips9461 No. They aren't. Supercells develop in minutes tornadoes even faster. What retard would grill in the 6 minutes it would take for that to happen and unlike the wizard of Oz you'd most likely never see the tornado. I've been in 4 hurricanes. You could actually plan a hurricane party. Tornado parties don't exist.
In Oklahoma they say, “when the tornado sirens go on, the lawn chairs come out”. Lol
Lol. Yes. For sure. 😂
Lol! My old man used to say “the best thing about tornado sirens is you get to meet the neighbors!”
Put the kids and dogs in the basement, then meet the neighbors in the middle of the road.
Unbelievably accurate. Could have one coming right at us and we’d probably wait until we felt it before we got inside a shelter.
Tornados: the hurricanes of the Midwest.
Imagine what the first Europeans must've thought of America, a land with strange people, animals, and almost biblical natural disasters
Wish it had kept them away, but sadly for the natives it didn’t….
Well considering how many of them were puritans, probably considered them wrath of god for punishing sinners.
They thought we had biblical locusts too
@@patroberts5449no one here is "native," not even the "natives" (so called.) Look it up.🇺🇸
@@timothyarmstrong3801 We did have Biblical locusts. The Locust Plague of 1874 is the worst locust swarm in recorded history. It was 1800 miles long, 110 miles wide, and devastated the Great Plains. Their species name (Caloptenus spretus) means "despised." Laws mandating the elimination of the Rocky Mountain locust, as well as the adoption of different farming cultivars/techniques led to the precipitous decline of the species, and the last one was sighted in 1902.
I’m from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, my family lost our house and everything we own in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Definitely a scary experience. We are good now thankfully :)
I remember this one well.It was a mere four weeks we got hit by Rita.It was the first time our family and friends had to evacuate.Our homes were spared but the trip was not very pleasant!
My best friend and her family lived in Gautier at that time, they got out, but lost most everything they had too.
I was in Livingston perish Louisiana during hurricane Katrina. We were the lucky ones and didn’t lose our home. Many of our friends and family did. I’m glad y’all are ok now. It was a scary experience but showed how many people stick together and helped.
I was just west of Baton Rougue when Rita hit, ironiclly volunteering in response to katrina.
I had family in Gulfport that got out early. When they came home, they had a new lawn ornament in the back yard: a casino. Casino's in Mississippi are illegal if put on land (you read that right) so all of them .. ALL OF THEM.. are on barges somewhere. The one in Gulfport lifted out of the ocean with the swell and a completely flattened anything in it's path with thousands of tons of barge, poker chips, and buildings just riding the waves like a surfer. It parked itself fully on some of the neighbors property but not before flattening my distant relative's house down to the slab.. and it was cracked, scarred and had all the pipes bent out.
Having your emergency radio or your smartphone with that app ringing in the middle of the night with a warning alert is a heart-stopping moment , and everyone who has ever experienced that knows exactly what I'm talking about
I feel like mother nature trying to murder Americans in new and unique ways has made us who we are. =D
She was bored and got creative with us. We got stubborn and creative right back
Tijuana Lol. You’re probably right
That's why we get along with Australians so well!
I believe it is punishment for what happened to the Indians/Native Americans.
I'm convinced this is why older generations have a hard time believing in Global Warming here. If they weather has gotten worse we've barely noticed. Nature was trying to kill us since we first got here. Disease, Wind, Rain, fire or even the Earth opening to swallow us, it's so common we barely flinch at it.
I grew up in the Midwest before moving to Brazil for a while. I never considered how weird my childhood tornado drills would seem to my Brazilian friends.
And if you think you’re safe in the American desert, you’d be wrong because we’ve got sandstorms/dust storms and monsoons.
I moved from Kansas to Arizona a few years ago and the first year I saw a massive dust devil that even had my roommate who was born there going wtf. The monsoons were wonderful to experience because it was almost like being back home.
Flash floods.
I was born in New Mexico and can attest to this. Dust devils were the desert version of tornadoes. I was always fearful of those blackish brown walls that were sand storms in the distance. I live in Georgia now and deal with severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, black ice in the winters, COVID-19 like mass panic but with bread and milk for those awesome milk sandwiches instead of toilet paper when a snowflake falls.
And don't let's get started on scorpions and rattlesnakes.
Don't forget the sandworms!
Yes, we do like our tornadoes here in the US. Back in the early 80's, my mom's car was actually picked up by a small tornado and planted on the other side of the highway she was driving on. No damage other than a cracked window, because thankfully the bulk of an overpass bridge seemed to have altered the wind enough that it didn't flip her car. Then, when I was about 14, our farm got narrowly missed by a tornado. It ripped down all the trees in our front yard, but didn't damage our house. However, it did rip the metal roof off our neighbors barn, which clipped our chimney as it passed over and then planted at a 45 degree angle into our hay field. The next morning, our neighbor, who was not all together stable mentally, came over with the police saying that we had stolen his barn roof. Lets just say the officer didn't make a fuss for OBVIOUS reasons. haha
Lolol
damn, was your mom wearing her brown pants?
Good times, right? LOL
@@mythdefied9070 I was when I was in on ....memorial day Dayton Ohio
In Alabama, if there is a slight chance of snow, schools either cancel or get delays. Now if there is a 100% chance of tornados we go to school, no cancellations, or delays.
It doesn't help that our newer built schools are built as functioning storm shelters.
I live in Alabama and actually what happens is that an hour before the tornadoes are forecast to start dropping from the sky, the schools cancel the rest of the day and send all the kids home and the daycare schools close and demand that the kids be picked up forcing many parents to sit in stop-and-go traffic going apoplectic while sirens are blaring and the meteorologists are saying, "Don't be in a manufactured home or a car because that's where most people die."
I’m from Oklahoma and that’s how it is here. Back when I was a kid and in school, late 80s through the 90s, our tornado drills were, go sit in the hall, head down, arms over your head. Let’s not worry about the fact that each end of the hall was solid glass doors to the outside. 😂😂
Was visiting Phoenix once in January, we got 1/4 inch of snow and the whole city shut down!
That used to happen to our school system too, however after the 2011 tornadoes hit, and hundreds of kids were still stuck in school ( the high school chemistry labs got hit), the school system wised up a little.
@@peoples_7736 I remember that storm. That was I was referring to. There was a pretty bad storm somewhere either in the late 90s or early 2000s, that killed a bunch of students. After that they allowed parents to pick up their children during really bad storms and caused schools to be built as shelters. I remember sheltering in the halls in 2011 over my lunch tray licking up the mash potatoes. We haven't had anything to bad since the 2011 storms and we never really had to ever use it. I think we practiced and used code reds (active shooters) more.
Lawrence, I'm originally from Massachusetts and have experienced mumerous hurricanes. I lived in L.A. for many years and experienced severe brush fires, mud slides and quite a few earthquakes, including the 6.7 1994 Northridge earthquake. (We moved out of CA shortly thereafter). Since then we've been in metro Denver, where we've had a couple of smaller tornadoes. If you move around enough, you get to see quite a lot of what the USA has to offer 🙂.
I've seen so many tornadoes I can tell from the color of the sky if one's coming
As a young boy growing up in south western Ohio we knew that if the sky turned green to the west during a storm it was time to head to the basement, quickly. Got very little warning in those days of tornadoes on the way.
@@coldfoot99 exactly
@JM Saultz I know that smell well. There can also be indicators much earlier in the day. More than once I've been out and about on a beautiful, sunny summer day, and my friends and I have commented "feels like tornadoes might be on the way," and sure enough, they show up later that evening. It's hard to put your finger on what it is, but I think it has something to do with the attitude of the wind and a certain brassy look to the sky.
Also, "the calm before the storm" is a very real phenomenon.
@@midwestmatthew9752 Part of that instinctive foreboding is probably also our bodies subconsciously sensing the drop in barometric pressure as the storm approaches.
Same
As a Californian life is just constantly that “I’m in danger” meme
More like the "This is fine" dog, lol
@40hecklerusp better than the fascist red state ANY.DAY.OF.THE.WEEK
Incisive Commenter
Nah. Capitalism rocks.
Incisive Commenter have fun in your bread lines
@@zachdaniel6285 Rocks what?
Much Respect to you!! you are only one of a few reactors that does not belittle us, talk down to us, or try to make us feel inferior. Thank you.
Question: What about sinkholes? Florida gets some pretty bad ones sometimes. You know where the ground just opens up in the middle of the night with no warning and eats most of your house/possibly you?
Sinkholes in Florida are a man-made phenomenon. Caused by overpopulation, resulting in draining the aquifers. Then, when the upper layers of soil get saturated, they collapse into the empty caverns where the water used to support the upper strata.
@@sueregan2782 While what you say is partially true, that's only for some of the recent ones. There are sink holes in Florida that have been here for hundreds of years as well, and folks didn't get their water from aquifers back then. Most of the underground stone in Florida is limestone, leading to the possibility of the ground just wearing away over time until the surface just collapses.
Wait until he learns that where I live (Memphis, TN) is sitting directly on top of a fault line that is scarily overdue for an earthquake.
- sneezes in Yellowstone -
Yeah.. Mineral, VA already did that.
"All these natural disasters... It's almost like this whole place is built on thousands of Indian burial grounds...."-Internet Meme
@Yo Ma *"You **_only_** moved the headstones!"* FTFY.
You forgot floods and mudslides. I'm a midwest girl-- yes, we really do go out to watch the tornadoes lol
They get those in the UK, really bad ones.
As a native of northeastern Wisconsin, I so appreciate you covering the Peshtigo Fire, which has historically been overshadowed by the (far less deadly) Great Chicago Fire that occurred on the same day. Accounts of the Peshtigo Fire are horrific. People sought safety by lowering themselves into wells and were then boiled alive. Eyewitnesses reported that the air itself became fire-a literal firestorm that reduced woods, buildings, and bodies to ash in a matter of minutes. Many townspeople only managed to survive by taking refuge in the waters of the Peshtigo River as the fire raged over their heads. It’s a little-known tragedy that deserves wider recognition, in light of the 1,500 human lives lost and the vast destruction of forest, wildlife, and property.
As a native Californian I dont even get out of bed for earthquakes.
Not a native but a long term resident here. One place i worked back before tje web and email we had magnitude pool. Make your guess put in your quarter then listen to the local news station give out what the usgs in menlo said the magnitude was. To this day i can still guess within 0.2 what ill find on the usgs site a minute later. And have freaked out some of my o.line friends.
Me: baby quake? 3.5-3.8. Lemme check.
Friends: huh?
me after checking: usgs says it was 3.6 epicenter abt 1 mile south of Hollister. Def baby quake.
Same. If it shakes longer than a handful of seconds or increases, I might sit up and take notice. Otherwise nah. No point.
@@adriennegormley9358 We definately don't even wake up for those.
During the last three quakes, I nudged my dog to stop scratching because I thought that's what was moving the couch. Rest assured, when I realized they had been quakes, I apologized to him. He grudgingly accepted the apology.
That's so funny to me. I've lived here in SoCal all my life, and I am so terribly afraid of earthquakes! We had a tiny little shake a couple nights ago and I was instantly poised and ready to grab baby, dog and cat and bolt the hell out of there LoL
Living in tornado alley, we live through several super cell thunderstorms every year. They are very scary even if they don't produce tornadoes, with wind strong enough to knock over trees and flash flooding washing cars down the street.
"Look at all those actives volcanoes," he says, indicating the American west coast while not mentioning how Iceland is completely obscured by all its red triangles.
Iceland has many, many volcanos, but when you get right down to it, is still a fairly small island.
Laird made my point. Iceland is actually rather small. I wouldn't want to be on Iceland if they all decided to erupt, but the Pacific Rim volcanoes (not just those on the west coast of the US) put Iceland in the backwaters, even though your island is famous for its volcanoes
you also can't forget about the one really big volcano in the US
@@Donosauros_Rex If Yellowstone ever lets go, no one Earth is ever going to forget it - those that survive, that is.
@@leifhietala8074I don't doubt that, if anyone survives it will be remembered in history books for hundreds if not thousands of years and will make all recorded eruptions before it seem like childs play
I grew up in Illinois and I distinctly remember the eerie combination of the windy air going suddenly and sickeningly still to the point it just 'felt weird'. Then the air turning this creepy yellow. It wasn't just the sky above you that was yellow, like with a sunset, it was the air surrounding you. It felt like you were living in a movie and somebody changed the color filter and also hit the pause button. Then it would smell like rotting apples, that's when you knew it was getting close. We didn't have a basement so we would kneel on the hallway floor where there were no windows. We would have to face the wall then cover ourselves with a thick blanket and curl into a ball with our hands over our head and neck.
Great discrption!
@@catcrazy8 Thanks!
My mom noticed how the sky would turn yellow on a spring 50 years ago when South Carolina had a number of tornadoes, We think one touched down close to our house. We had taken shelter in the basement, but dad noticed this one tree that had been twisted off.
I keep remembering the Joplin (Missouri) tornado in 2011 where 158 people died. It hit the hospital...
My aunt lives in Joplin and I remember that day the rest of the family all lives in PA and we were all freaking out when we saw the news and no one could get a hold of her. Thank God she was ok though
As a Joplin native, yeah. It was terrible. My family (husband and daughter) were very lucky. We were less than half a mile from the path of the tornado, and if my husband had been at work that evening, like he was asked to be but turned down the hours, he would have been in a building that was hit. So, yes, a scary day in our local history.
I remember seeing the aftermath in TV and thought that was the worst sight I'd ever seen of a natural disaster. Wiped to the foundations. Prayed so much for all of you there. Awful purely awful.
I drove through there a few days later on my way to OKC. The damage was profound.
@@garydean0308 I'm from Oklahoma myself, and we sent a *lot* of people to help. Unsurprisingly, we've gotten pretty good at tornado recovery here.
Actually, tornadoes happen every year. Just like we have "road construction season," we also have "tornado season."
And, the "Big One" may actually be from the New Madrid fault line, which moves more in the eastern US than people like to admit -- and, if you research the New Madrid fault line, it could be potentially be a 9.5+ on the Richter scale.
Or even the Wasatch fault line in Utah
I live right on top of the New Madrid Fault...
@@Ammo08 : I lived near it 6 years ago, in Southern Illinois.
@@isaiahwelch8066 if that puppy slips like it did in 1812 everything from St Louis to Memphis is coming down..
@@Ammo08 : I'd say everything from St. Louis to Pittsburgh -- because the Alleghenies are on that fault line as well.
When you bleeped yourself while talking calmly about tornadoes, I about jumped and ran to the basement. (It's dark now, no point in going outside to watch...) That's the frequency of the tornado emergency beep here in central Kansas!
LOL. Same in Illinois. Sounded like the very beginning of a weather alert!
Same in Delaware; emergency broadcasting system alert tone.
Recently had a harrowing experience with a tornado last year in Chicago. I was out running errands with my kids (we were on one of those long tail cargo bikes where the kids sit on the rack in the back). It was cloudy and everything seemed ok outside. I stopped to pick up some McDs a few blocks from my apartment. My husband was on his way home from work. He was going to stay and work longer but something told him to just come back home and not stay. After I pick up the food I get the tornado warning on my phone to seek shelter immediately. As I’m rushing home the cloudy grey sky suddenly turns dark and I can see the supercell forming in the sky right above our neighborhood. I’ve seen supercells and tornadoes on tv but seeing it in real life is really something else, and I’m outside on a bike with my kids which makes it even scarier. I’m a few streets away from my home and my husband is calling me to get back immediately. The rain and winds start and debris and tree branches are flying everywhere. I’m riding against the wind and can barely see anything because there is sooo much rain. I was terrified and just praying we would get home safe. The only way I was able to ride so fast with all that rain and wind going against me was the adrenaline. My kids had no idea the danger we were in. My daughter was just laughing and amused the whole way (we nicknamed her StormChaser after this incident). We get home and my husband is outside our home just screaming “GET IN!!!”. We ran inside with the kids and he went outside to grab the bike. Luckily we made it home safe. The supercell moved towards the lake (Lake Michigan) and touched down in the Rogers Park neighborhood (on the north side of Chicago next to the lake) where it made its way to the lake and turned into a waterspout. I know I’ll definitely never forget this experience and will always remember that feeling of awe and terror at seeing the supercell forming right before my eyes. I’ve lived in the US my entire life but we don’t get tornados often in Chicago so I never thought this was something that would happen to me. Definitely gave me a bigger respect for how unpredictable Mother Nature is. And if you guys ever get a tornado warning take it seriously and get the f**k outta there to shelter immediately, the weather can go from nice to deadly in literally seconds. Tornadoes form fast!
You were praying. He was listening, granting wishes everywhere.
Wow, you had me captivated with this story! I’ve lived through some big quakes in CA, but that tornado story is SCARY.
You spoke about hurricane Katrina. Well my mother my daughter and myself stayed in Biloxi Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina. And if the news hasn’t reported everything about New Orleans. You would’ve seen the devastation from Waveland to Pascagoula Mississippi was destroyed. The surge came all the way across the coast and around through Biloxi VA back around through the rivers and marshes. And sweat the houses off their pylons into Interstate 10. It truly broke my heart to see my home pretty much wiped off the planet. Childhood landmarks in memories were gone. The only good thing about hurricane is that you can prepare yourself for the worst and expect the best outcome. And I still live here today. Because this is my home
Much of damage from Katrina storm was not the storm itself but from the levies giving way. It was human preventable error. Authorities knew in advance that the levies would not hold up to a certain category storm and did nothing to take care of the problem beforehand. Plus the government reacted slowly once the levies broke. Stop blaming Katrina.
@@GCMickens You're talking about New Orleans. ywohipp2tripp is talking about the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The devastation there was from the hurricane's storm surge and wind. Katrina's storm surge in Mississippi was the most extensive and highest in recorded U.S. history. I grew up in southern Mississippi and was quite familiar with the Gulf Coast, and still have family down there. When I visited for Christmas after Katrina they took me to the coast (the parts that were accessible) and it was truly heart rending - it was as if a giant arm had swept everything into the ocean.
My thoughts go out to you -- lived in Ocean Springs and Pascagoula for a while, a few years after Katrina. We were in PCB during, I went out and played in the rain and watched the gigantic waves, it was a blast, but man...seeing the devastation in MS even a couple years later was something else. Nobody really talked about it much, either. I don't think I'll ever forget the marshes, full of dead trees from the storm. Spooky as hell. I hope y'all are doing better these days! Man, I wonder if Bozo's is still around...best burgers I've had in forever. Took me ten years to find another burger as good!
"Mother Nature has it in for you..." LMAO! And I'm an American who lives in Florida, where the Hurricane season has specific start and stop dates (and from where companies that sell generators get most of their income).
We're having another drought year in California. Some homeless guy hit me up for a dollar because the price of bottled water went up again. No seriously. The pantsless guy ACTUALLY took a gallon of water from the cooler at the Walgreens, paid for it, and went back to hide in the shade because it was 101(F) out .He ACTUALLY bought what he said he would with my dollar. Cool.
(TBH, my "water" is ice brewed for a smooth taste😝)
If I recall correctly, Florida actually gets more tornadoes (or at least more per square mile) than Oklahoma. The difference is Florida doesn't get as many powerful tornadoes. Hurricanes AND tornadoes - that's crazy!
How are those start and stop dates working out for y'all? I know recently there was a year with three named storms before the start date (Is it July 1?).
Never thought I'd hear an English person say they miss English weather lmao
@TheRenaissanceman65 Can get a bit soggy though, as in floods of late...
Most Europeans will eventually miss Europe, at least most recent emigrants. The only recent emigrants that feel like they won the lottery by being in the USA are possibly south and Central American, Asians, Africans, and only if they were poor in their country.
I was born in Kansas and lived in most of the southern states. In 63rs I have been through (that I can remember) 4 minor earthquakes, 3 hurricanes, 1 blizzard (you left those out) and more tornados than I could even count. But one thing you have to remember about tornados is there is no 1 storm 1 twister rule. A single storm can produce 2,3 or several tornados as it moves. My response at this point in my life is to sit in the recliner and watch roku while my family hides in the bathroom with a mattress to cover them up. Something else you might want to include that I doubt Britain has are heat waves, where people literally die from getting too hot. I really enjoy your broadcasts. Keep up the good work.
4:16 Yellowstone. I am terrified when I think about Yellowstone.
We made it through 2012.
There are a few other volcanoes just as large globally the next to erupt probably won't be yellowstone.
@@ssssaa2 honestly the cascades are far more likely to erupt than Yellowstone
@Google made me change my name damn it ya but it still scares me.
@@battleship217 Only because of the minor problem of there technically being three active volcanoes in WA at the moment.
While Nashville did get a nasty hit, the real tragedy was in a small city named Cookeville, about 80 miles east, with a death toll of about 18. That is the vast majority of the 25 deaths related to this most recent storm.
And yeah, the 1906 quake was rough. However, the vast majority of the destruction and deaths wasn't due to the quake - directly - but from the fire that happened in the aftermath.
Crazy! I lived in Cookeville in 1995! This is the first I've ever heard reference to it. I hope everyone is ok 💓💓💓
@@naseerahvj Me, too. I graduated from Tech that year.
When the sky turns green and birds stop singing head for the SW corner the basement. I am from Indiana and have been in three earthquakes in the East, one very major tornado, several smaller tornadoes, three hurricanes and One blizzard.
Green sky is almost always a guaranteed tornado, Followed by the blackest skys during the tornado.
wulffy54914 didn’t know that, we don’t get hardly any tornadoes in Florida but we do get freaking hurricanes!!
@@ceciliag2929 Tornadoes are what did a lot of the damage in Hurricane Andrew. Tons of little F4s popping out of the clouds and razing my ex-father-in-law's boyhood neighborhood to the ground. The big storm and the broad winds get all of the sexy coverage, and storm surge often does the majority of the damage, but hurricanes spawn tornadoes within them.
I was a little kid in the 70s when a huge tornado destroyed the high school in my area of Indiana. I remember playing outside with my brothers and cousins when the sky turned a really freaky shade of green and it got really quiet. That's when my uncle rushed us all inside and crammed a bunch of scared and confused kids into an interior hallway because there was no basement.
@@smartbecauseiam864 broomstick, Indiana tornado?
I moved to America from a country with no earthquakes. To say that I was scared sh!tless because of the aftershocks from the Napa valley earthquake a few years ago is an understatement....
"Here's a map of all the active volcanoes in Britain"
Britain: none
Here in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, there are too many hills and trees to see tornados coming. Because I’ve also lived in New Orleans, people ask me which I fear more: tornados or hurricanes? Definitely tornado-hardly any warning and nowhere to hide. With hurricanes, you usually get plenty of warning, just very expensive to “evacuate”.
I like only enough time to hide, I mean take shelter.
Meanwhile I'm over here with earthquakes in Southern California. We finally have an app that might give us a few seconds of warning, depending on your distance from the epicenter. 😐
#Deborah Danielson, you must have never experienced being in the northeast quadrant eyewall of a big hurricane as it comes ashore. That part of a hurricane is full of tornadoes. (New Orleans doesn't usually get the brunt of the northeast quadrant full force because of geography.) I've been through almost every hurricane to hit coastal Mississippi since we moved here in 1993. Including Katrina.
I grew up in southern Michigan, spent time in Kansas during summers, and was stationed in NM, the Philippines, and TX prior to relocating here. I've experienced tornadoes, hurricanes, smaller wildfires, plus earthquakes and typhoons while overseas. (Thankfully, we missed the eruptions of Mt Pinatubo by a year.) I love living here on the coast, but hurricanes are not easier to deal with than tornadoes by a long shot. And you don't always get days and days of time to prepare for a hurricane either. Plus, a tornado is usually (although not always) a relatively quick affair. I can think of several hurricanes that stalled out with the eyewall almost directly overhead. For over 12 hours. This isn't counting the hours of dreadful anticipation as a monster storm closes in on you, nor the time it takes for the beast to finally leave your area completely.
And if you have a hooptie old car, try to evacuate, and it breaks down within an hour or two on the side of the road as you're evacuating? The reason people died in New Orleans is because they couldn't evacuate prior to the storm, and then the levees failed. There are public shelters, but they are a last resort thing for us; you have to bring supplies, which I have been told may possibly be confiscated by workers upon entering to share with those who couldn't be bothered to bring their own supplies. We had just finished building our own mostly underground shelter just prior to Katrina, and so did not have to leave.
Not everyone has the luxury of evacuating for hurricanes. Some people cannot afford evacuation or don't own a vehicle, some have livestock or many pets which they can't just leave behind, and others have jobs which require them to stay (emergency response personnel, maintenance, infrastructure, hospital/care home staff, process workers, etc...).
Then there can be the extended aftermath of a hurricane. The cleanup after Katrina took a year or more in a path over 100 miles wide and deep. Folks over a huge area were without power on average for a month, and some longer than that. Communications (cell and landlines) were down or spotty for weeks. No power for AC in the sweltering heat, with natural shade gone, becuse the trees left standing were all denuded. Plus having to try to sleep in that heat & high humidity, plus the horrible bugs getting in everywhere.
In your time in New Orleans, did you ever experience a direct hit by a hurricane, ride it out, and have to endure a protracted aftermath?
I'll take the tornado as the lesser weather problem, especially if you live in an area where most homes have basements, plus you can buy a weather alert radio, and most phones will give you alerts with enough lead time to seek shelter.
And yes, I have experienced tornado warnings and actual tornadoes - in MI, OH, KS, NM, TX, (two very close calls while tent camping), and some non-hurricane related ones here in MS (one that flipped our chicken coop 70 yards from the house). Hurricanes/typhoons are no picnic, and you can't always leave.
I remember the one tornado I lived through in Tennessee. It came out of nowhere and just went by us in our car. Thankfully it was an F0 otherwise I'm sure we would have been tossed around 8'D
What, no love for sinkholes. While they aren't as flashy as earthquakes, there's nothing like the ground silently opening up and swallowing a car dealership with some nice sports cars or a couple lanes of I-4.
I guess not deadly enough since I believe 4 people have ever been killed in Florida by sinkhole.
He probably left sinkholes out because Britain has them too?
I had been expecting avalanches, but they do happen in Scotland. I guess that is why they aren't in the video either.
Nope. Florida is going to have to up it's game to make the list. :)
@@illogicerr3769 Hah. True. We have hurricane parties here in FL. They only scare me cat 4+ or when they spawn tornadoes.
@@SherriLyle80s I so miss hurricane parties! And tornado BBQ
I live in CA and people are always saying "Oh, Gosh. You must be terrified of earthquakes!" and I reply, "No. I'm more terrified of the hundreds of wildfires we have each year and the endless droughts we have." The last three summers have been nothing but ash-fests. Gray skies and ash all over your car when you wake up in the morning. We had one fire in the Santa Cruz mountains last year that was less than 25 miles from us. Scary!
As a side note: Mt. St. Helens didn't erupt. It friggin exploded. Erupt was definitely not the right word.
It is called a pyroclastic eruption. Caused by high silica magma under great pressure, they are explosive eruptions to be sure.
+James Lucke Whether a volcano oozes lava or ejects ash at supersonic speed,it is called an eruption either way.
Funny that you brought up the word "side" when also mentioning Mt. St. Helens and exploding. That thing did not blow its top. No, it blew its side out!
In fact it’s last eruption was less than twenty years ago.
To be fair first the top of the mountain fell off and then exploded.
I haven't seen a tornado. That's because I was crouching under a table while the ceiling tiles and light fixtures were crashing down around me.
We advise you to stay indoors and seek shelter during a F5 tornado
OKlahoma: I’m ain’t afraid of no twister I’m just going to watch it
To be fair, nothing short of an underground shelter or one of those (relatively) new above ground armored rooms is going to survive getting hit by an EF5 anyway. Might as well check it out- your outcome is almost certainly going to be the same regardless if you can't get in one of those places.
Any time I get tornado watch or warning alerts, I automatically go outside. My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy and refuses to spend more than a couple minutes outside with me. I tell him it’s fine, I know if/when a tornado is heading our way. He just side eyes me and walks back in the house. 😂
At first you annoyed me. Now I cannot miss an episode. I am often amazed at the amount of research you do relating to American history. A great deal of information you present is unknown to far too many Americans. Kudos to you, sir.
I've lived through 3 tornadoes. My roof was destroyed in one, my house was skipped over in the second while houses on either side were destroyed, the third damaged a storage building and thrust a fence post to completely through an oak tree. Mother Nature doesn't play around.
Hi, Lawrence. When I was in the Army in California, it must've been in 1979, I woke up with my bed in the middle of the room. I was confused because I didn't know how that could happen. Then I heard some of the men talking about the "terrible earthquake" last night - the one that I slept through.
In 1980, again in the Army, this time in North Carolina, I was standing guard duty and I saw a tornado in the distance. Yes, it was in the distance, but I could see it coming closer and closer to me so I was rolling over in my mind how close I would let it get before I abandoned my post. Thankfully, the Captain of the Guard relieved me before I had to do that.
Aren't 'Acts of God' an exception to the general orders?
J
I've lived in Florida on the east coast for 52 years and have been through many hurricanes. And yes they are scary as hell. I have seen one tornado in all those years. It was a waterspout that came ashore while I was stopped at a traffic light. I was mesmerized. The sky was black, but the tornado was as white as snow. I watched until the green light, then I floored it out of there. No one was hurt, but a few oceanfront condos got minor damage.
On Florida's west coast I've seen numerous waterspouts practically every storm season. It's rare they make landfall to become true tornadoes, but one or two a year does happen...Last year had one tearing down a busy street, blowing a few transformers, & snapping a railroad crossing bar off. A few blocks went without power for a couple days with some injures, but I didn't hear about any deaths.
We had an odd RARE winter tornado touch down just east of Cleveland. It carved up our local public golf course. Knocked down five trees, bounced back up and dropped on ONE sole persons home, destroyed their house and the neighbors weren’t even touched. Our FD/PD and whole city came together to help this family. So rare to get them up by the Lake.
My grandfather was a captain on the iron ore ships and survived the "White Hurricane" of 1913. Bodies washed up on the shorelines.
I was a youngster of 9 years old in 1969, and my father was in the Air Force, stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi when Hurricane Camille came to visit. It was also a category 5 hurricane, and did a LOT of damage. There was a big death toll that actually came down a bit as recovery efforts and research came into play. It turned out that there were a lot (don't recall at my now advanced age whether it was 10's or more than 100) bodies found that had been washed out of some of the above-ground graves in the area. I do recall seeing a lot of dead cattle, though, as well as more than one freighter washed ashore. We went to the airbase and sheltered in a fortified hangar, and alas, I slept through the entire height of the storm. It was fast moving and completely gone when we went home to (a semi-destroyed) rental property we lived in at the time. Oh, and EDIT - I have seen a couple of tornadoes. I am fascinated by them.
I heard about that storm. My dad was in junior high, and he told me of a story he heard about a party of "storm sitters" that thought it would be a good idea to have a sit-in at someone's house right on the beach. Considering how the house and the people inside it were never seen again, I imagine they came to regret that choice.
@@K9TheFirst1 It was actually a "Hurricane Party" held at a beach-side motel. After the storm, only the concrete foundation was left, and everyone in that building was killed. I think this is probably what you are referring to. [EDIT] Here's a link, but it is clearly bad OCR. But it is from the NY Times, at that time a reputable purveyor of news: www.nytimes.com/1977/09/18/archives/swept-away-swept-away.html
Oh, and accounts vary on whether it was a motel or an apartment, but my memory says motel where a bunch of young folks had decided to have a party.
I drove through Biloxi, in 1970. A LOT of the damage was still visible.
I was 3 years old then, and remember that the wind was so hard in Jackson that the traffic lights were horizontal. We went down to the coast in 73, and you could still see the devastation in parts of it.
@@badguy1481 I moved to the Mississippi gulf coast in 1970 from the Texas gulf coast. Spent my life dodging hurricanes along the gulf. Sometimes not so successfully. At least with hurricanes you know they're coming.
I grew up on Dallas, TX. I've seen the sky turn green, we did tornado drills in school. I had to move to North Carolina to experence one. When I called the city to complain that I didn't hear sirens before it happened, they told me we don't have tornado siren's because we don't have tornadoes . My neighbors crushed house begged to differ.
I too have seen the sky turn green when I lived in Florida. Preparing for various natural disasters is a fact of life here. That's not to say that they're common, but if you're smart, you'll keep a stocked bug out bag in your home and vehicle, and never let your vehicle drop below say, half a tank of fuel, in case of evacuation alerts.
It's true. No sirens down in NC. It was weird moving to Missouri and hearing them on a regular basis (routine testing).
But in NC, I think they're only active for a few seconds, maybe a minute, whereas in the Midwest, in parts they can stay grounded (though rare) for up to half an hour. That's far worse, that much more terrifying.
When I was little, I was stuck in a car in a Walmart parking lot watching a tornado touchdown nearby. Luckily my dad got back in time and we left. About 2 or 3 minutes later and that tornado was over that parking lot. Fun times.
Don't leave your kids in car alone, they could be hit by a tornado! Or even another car having a car accident!!
I was a little girl of 8 in 1964 when we went on a camping vacation driving from Ohio to Colorado and back. I don't remember the state but I do remember seeing the tornado funnel heading towards us. My dad put the pedal to the metal and our 63 Ford Falcon hit it's top speed limit. That was a great vacation! First encounter with tornado, rattle snakes, and bears oh my!
I'm suprised that you didn't mention that your former home, Indiana, is about as prone to large tornados as Kansas is.
Re: earthquakes. Some of the strongest earthquakes in history were the New Madrid quakes, which actualy altered the course of the Mississippi River. Some of them exceded eight on the Richter Scale. They occoured in 1811 and 1812.
Most of Yellowstone National Park is the caldera of an enormous active volcano.
You aren't kidding --- Stay out of Goshen, Warsaw, Wabash County, North Judson and Fullerton Indiana in the early to mid spring.
Yes, but Kansas is better known for tornados because of the Wizard of Oz.
@@ingriddubbel8468 = LoL!! No argument there.
Dorthy certainly made Twisters pop culture.
*tornado warning*
My mom: What do y'all want for dinner?
When I was a child we lived in Oklahoma where we lived trough several tornadoes.
As a teen we lived in Texas where I experienced multiple hurricanes.
Now I’m an Alaskan and here I’ve experienced ash fall from a volcano, many earthquakes (including that big one about a year and a half ago), and in years we don’t get much snow, the lack of an ice pack melting in spring makes the whole state burn. Some years the fire map makes it look like the entire state is on fire.
But Alaska has so many ways it can kill you, but it’s worth the risk to exist here. Also, you can die at anytime anywhere so it’s best to just be where you want to be.
The death rate is always the same, everywhere, everytime. I person. 1 death.
*Cribbed from Robert Heinlein.
@SWeRP Hurricane Tracking I lived there in the 70s, 80s, 90s, to the early 00s, before Mother Nature went full-on mental so snow happened lightly with years apart back then. I also lived mostly in central to southern Texas, far from where tornados were known to be. In fact, Waco was hit with a massive tornado in the 50s I believe, and it *SHOCKED* the Waco population because they were under the impression Waco would *never* get a tornado. The droughts in all too familiar with. For a while I lived in San Antonio, situated on the edge of the hill country and the desert so it had an insane identity crisis. You would have like 9 months of like no rain, but with all the creeks you still had obscene humidity! The last Christmas I spent in San Antonio I called time and temperature around midnight and it was like 85 degrees and 90% humidity. Gawd I hated living in San Antonio! You could step fresh out of the shower, dress in perfectly clean clothes, open your door and between the oppressive heat and the inescapable humidity you would be DRENCHED in sweat by the time you make it to the car.
I’ve moved over 30 times in my life and I’ve lived coast to coast, and I can easily say what keeps me from wanting to return to Texas is the regular oppressive heat married to humidity that is constant is the thing that keeping me from ever wanting to go back there, not it’s hurricanes and tornados. I don’t consider droughts because growing up there drought was just natural part of yearly Texan hell cycle, you always expect it and always mentally crucify the assholes starting massive fires flicking their cigarettes out of cars.
As for the severe winter storms, we created climate change and Mother Nature is kicking our asses as a response. Maybe if Texas can get some representation interested in building a solid infrastructure, they would have a power grid built that doesn’t freak out and die when it gets a little cold out. But who am I kidding? Thats silly thought and will never happen. Keeping chains in the car to throw on your tires to drive safely and winter storms aren’t that bad (speaking as an Alaskan so I know a thing or two about winter storms and traveling after they hit). We can always tell when someone has moved here from a southern state because they drive like a terrified grandma in icy conditions the rest of us have learned how to drive normally. It’s frustrating to see because they drive so slowly in their ignorance thinking they are driving safely, they are actually a hindrance to traffic making driving conditions worse. There are ways to safely travel in severe winter conditions, you just have to learn them then get the confidence to drive with your knowledge, not letting fear of the ice turn you into a danger for others.
@SWeRP StormTracking You forgot Sharknados
I have ashes from Mt. St. Helen from the eruption from the 80’s. I stole it as a kid from my grandparents 😅
My parents were in Salt Lake City, Utah and heard a roar and saw windows shake in their frames. Hot damn, that must have been a big event.
Wowwww.... that was a hardcore event.
My great-grandmother had ashes from Mt. St. Helens that she collected when it rained down.
I live in Oklahoma.
He sounds disappointed that the 6.1 quake in Britain didn't kill anyone.
Britain's always got villains that need gotten rid of, like Richard III or Modred, maybe he's hoping some rather nasty villain gets it.
One of the scariest tornadoes that I remember recently was the Joplin, Mo F5 tornado. Lots of camera footage of it too
Oh, that was absolutely awful! Pretty much wiped the city off the map, and Joplin was no small town. Heartbreaking, that one.
El Reno, Joplin, Moore anymore? Greenville, KS to name an other.
Heard about the Butterfly People who showed up that day .
One of the scariest
I think that has been the deadliest tornado in a century I think. The 10 year anniversary was recent and i think that's what they said.
2:14 ACTUALLY!! One of the HIGHEST ranking earthquakes to be RECORDED happened in Alaska on March 27, 1964 in Prince William Sound at a crazy magnitude of 9.2!!!
And wasn't it followed by a tsunamis along the West Coast and Hawaii? (He didn't talk about tsunamis at all - Great Britain hasn't had one since the 1700's.
Thank you Skittle Barf! I was living in Alaska during that earthquake! I still do... :)
Toni Solin ofc! I’m kinda a history buff, so that was something I thought deserved credit 👍🏼 Alaska is a part of the US too!!
I remember that earthquake. In fact, National Georaphic did an article on it and I kept it in a scrapbook for years. Had a picture of a woman holding onto the edge of a crevasse that opened into the earth.
Really the biggest earthquake took place in the chilean city of Valdivia in 1960 with a 9,5 scale and a Tsunami. They have to up the scale for that magnitude...
I’ve said similar myself: the US has HUGE weather compared to Europe in general (though it seems that climate change is starting to mess with the weather over there). As a Midwesterner I’m obligated to go out on the porch & stare at the sky whenever there’s a tornado warning, instead of actually seeking shelter, & I’ve seen some massive awesome terrifying clouds. Also your countryman Neil Gaiman said as an Englishman he only *thought* he knew what winter was before he moved to Minnesota 😊.
In my family we stand outside and watch.the tornadoes till the house starts spinning
@@kimworkman2425 They aren't really dangerous until they get close.
On the other hand, we never did have a Great Stink like London did.
@@bob7975 Just like bullets
As you should! That's proper tornado procedure for the Midwest.
When Mt. Helen blew, my house was covered by ash, and I live in NEW MEXICO 😶
They said there was ash in the stratosphere that circled the globe from Mt. Saint Helen. The cap on that volcano is growing 10 feet a year. It's probably going to blow again in the next century or two.
The 1900 hurricane that struck Galveston was a straight-up horror show. Imagine all of the worst possible things that can come from a Hurricane -- floods, destruction, death -- and Galveston suffered it 1000 times worse than what you can imagine.
There is a great book written by Erik Larson called Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. All about the Galveston Hurricane.
I saw a show about that Galveston hurricane once. Sounded like hell on earth. Didn't it happen during the night also?
In Dallas we don't get hurricanes but they spawn tornadoes that reach out to get us. And then we feel guilty for receiving needed rain.
Missouri once had an earthquake that made the Mississippi River flow backwards and made church bells ring in Boston.
The New Madrid fault. Not well known because the area was sparsely populated at the time.
I’ve grew up not far from the fault line on the Illinois side of the Mississippi in the town next to one destroyed by the TriState tornado in 1925. We got to have both tornado and earthquake drills in school as a result. The New Madrid quakes in 1811/1812 are estimated to be in 7-8 range, and school drills always included that we probably were due for another big one sometime “soon” geologically speaking.
Yup, biggest by far. He missed out on blizzards as well. A few other noteworthy and historically devastating cat 5"s such as New York's big one that killed thousands and moved the coastline back a fair piece and Agnus of the early 70's and even Andrew that recorded the highest sustained wind, above 200mph. Wildfire that hit western Montana a decade or so ago burned an area half the size of the UK. In any given year the death toll from tornadoes in the US beat the entire lifetime of Britain. No need to worry about Yellowstone though. If it goes, he'll be buried in ash with the rest of us.
And rattled china in Washington D.C.
And rang church bells in Boston and Florida
You should read up on the tornado that struck Greensburg KS and almost wiped the entire town off the map! It was an EF-5 and a MILE wide! My grandma/ grandpa and uncle all lived there when it happened. It was a VERY scary night until we knew they were all ok. There were not many casualties, but alot of people (my family included) lost everything. It happened on May 4, 2007.
I live in North Carolina. The only earthquake I ever experienced was 9 years ago. It was more like a train going by than what you see in the movies. Honestly, it just rattled the pictures on the wall. I didn’t even realize what had happened until later. We’ve also had wildfire smoke all the way from Florida. I’ve been to Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Rainier. Also, I’ve never seen a tornado before either.
I live in Georgia and we had one about 4 years ago and it was exactly like this. I believe it was only a 2.5
@Rachel P I remember that too. My daughter and I thought it was a semi truck that was shaking the ground, but we live in Johnston Co, not Wake Co. When we heard it was an earthquake we were like WHAT???
Although there is a fault line running up through North and South Carolina, I don't think many people realize it. The earthquake in Charleston was a big deal in 1886, and you can see the bolts in the historic houses because of it.
Living in oklahoma in the Spring and early Summer:
*Tornados. Tornados everywhere*
I've lost count of the tornados. Okie here
Shuuuush! Don't say teh T-word or Moore is gonna get hit again!
And the quakes. And those thunderstorms are nightmares. I always thought I liked watching a good summer thunderstorm here in Idaho. But the ones in OK... they're like living through a bombing raid.
Odd how some areas are hit more. I haven't seen a tornado since I moved to the SE corner of Dallas; my old neighborhood got torn up again last year, NW (and north central, a cluster simultaneously). 0
There's an area a few miles away from me where it just seems like tornadoes land every year, and they make their way in my direction. Last year that area had twin tornadoes touch down, but luckily they dissipated fairly quickly.. For as much as they touch down near me, I wish I had a shelter. Luck always runs out sooner or later.
The closest tornado I've been to was I was staying at my moms friends house in Florida and I went on the back patio with her son to watch the rain rolling in. The friend lived on 20 acres and I saw a thing touchdown on the ground and I look at the son. I only got the words is that.... he yelled RUN!!!! We hid in a tiny 1/2 bath. We had 3 adults, 2 children, a green wing macaw, and 3 flipping large dogs in there. After 45 minutes we came out and the path that it took was down the pasture and into the woods. We were very lucky.
Jessica Ely BTW, a half bath in the US is a toilet and a sink, and is not mch bigger than a closet.
Wow I admire that you all were able to get in that 1/2 bath!
@@amymason6234 no shit a half bath is just a sink and toliet. That's why it's called a half bath 🤦♀️. Not all half baths are the size of a closet. My friend made her half bath capable to fit an electric wheelchair. Her husband was in an electric wheelchair for the last 6 months of his life. They made sure that when they built their house her husband could get into all bathrooms. My 1/2 bath is also gigantic. My 1/2 bath doorway isn't capable of fitting a full size wheelchair, but you can easily cut the doorway to fit a full size wheelchair if need be. Once this happens you are capable of taking a full size wheelchair into there. My brother is adding a 1/2 bath to his house and it's going to be able to fit an electric wheelchair. You can't make a blanket statement like you did. People design their homes to the way they like it a lot of times.
These Lost in the Pond videos are really interesting. I lived decades in Kansas and never once encountered a tornado. Topeka and Wichita used to have alot, especially in Spring. My town never had even one, of which I was always thankful. I have never encountered a tornado while being elsewhere, either.
I am from Tulsa Oklahoma when it comes to Tornados some of us just grab a beer or a soft drink go outside and just watch it pass on by.
I'm in Kansas and we do the same 🤣
I was just going to say that myself. Grew up in Kansas. After the tornado(s) were done my friends and I would drive around and look at the damage.
Same here in Wisco. Except we grab beers for literally any event.
Anthony Pagano No you don’t. I drove through Moore a day or two after the big one. Now that’s jaw-dropping devastation!
@@ltcajhNo You Don't. I never said they didn't cause damage reread what I said
I know I'm several months late to this video so I don't know if you'll see this, but my hometown was actually completely destroyed by a wildfire in California in late 2018. The Camp Fire, as it came to be called because of the area where it started and not because anyone was camping, destroyed 95% of all structures and displaced almost 50,00 people from the total area the fire covered. My family's home burned down but thankfully everyone happened to be out of town at the time. Other friends of mine were not so lucky, and had narrow escapes during the gridlocked evacuation. It was a traumatizing event for all and the area still looked like a war zone when I went back many months later. Fires like that are likely to only become more common in California in coming years. It's sad to see so many beloved places I grew up with literally turning to ash before my eyes. In the future, our species is going to have to get better at both controlling climate change and safeguarding against disaster in the construction, planning, and management of inhabited areas.
Anyway great video, you're awesome!
In 2011 in Joplin missouri, there were multiple tornados that began rotating around one another, which lead to a 1 mile wide tornado forming around them.
I grew up there and went to college at MSSC ( now MSSU) before moving overseas. I was walking out of my job and looked up at the giant TV screen one of the buildings had on its side and saw what looked like I expect a nuclear bomb strike would look like. Then, I saw the crawl at the botom of the screen about the Joplin Tornadow. I spent the next 5 hours calling everybody I could think of to see if they were ok. Luckily my Mom and Sister were safe and so were my friends.
@@jtilton5 yea, I was 11 at the time and I had family there too, it was the first time I was truly terrified.
The Joplin tornado was heart wrenching to see. The devastation was huge. Joplin has two large hospitals. One was demolished. Half the town was razed as if a bomb had landed and taken the houses away. While the houses have been rebuilt, the trees are gone and the charm of the neighborhoods is missing. Fortunately the high school held its graduation elsewhere so the students weren't there when the school was demolished. President Obama visited Joplin after that tornado and it was reported on the major morning news programs. I'm tired of tornadoes. I've lost friends in them and they have come too close as well as come on site (minor and not significant damage). The Joplin tornado has numerous videos on TH-cam if you want to see and learn about it. It was one of the most destructive tornadoes in U.S. history.
I remember that storm. Was in Springfield mo during it. Was awful.
I watched the chase start to end, the storm was not multiple tornados converging, it was it's own type called a multi-vortex that formed before the main event died after the RFD broke it away from the parent updraft, then we have our main infamous storm on cycle number 2.
As a Hoosier, I'm comforted to know that when you lived here, you were never one of those idiots who stood out on their porch watching/filming an oncoming tornado. I've lived through several of them, most notably the 1965 Palm Sunday Outbreak, May 1974 (was in a car driving swiftly when a tornado formed a few miles behind us, and most recently, September 2002 when my apartment sustained little damage but a house across the street had it's entire roof torn off.
I'm in California, so, duh, yeah, I've experienced lots of earthquakes. The personal worst for me was the Whittier Narrows quake (I think they might have renamed it later). It was only a 5.9 or 6.0, but I was at work, and the building essentially sat right on the epicenter. We evacuated the building, and while we were standing in the parking lot, several aftershocks hit. It's the only time I've been standing on the ground and felt the ground -- literally -- bounce under my feet.
I lived in Portland for 11 years which is up North of California but Portland is about the same earthquake-wise as Los Angeles. I've felt a few Earthquakes, but most of the time it was the dog would flip out or the toilet would make weird noise or the furniture would start squeaking
It might be surprising, but we also get earthquakes occasionally here in the Midwest. Here in Iowa I can remember two happening in the last 20 years, both quite light but noticeable. Before I was born, my mom experienced a stronger one near Davenport Iowa. It caused her to hurt her knees because the sudden shaking drove her leg first into the ground as she tried to stay stable. Then she heard screaming and rushed outside to find that her neighbor had been on a ladder cleaning her gutters, and as the ladder had swayed, she had grabbed the only thing available to stop from falling to the ground, that being a set of power cables running to her roof. My mom had to get a pair of rubber gloves and push her neighbor's ladder back against the roof, because the woman was acting as a grounded current and couldn't be touched. Later the quake made the news, though it was revealed that it mostly was felt by the Mississippi River where the ground was more porous and thus the shaking carried significantly farther. Major earthquakes only happen in this area about once every 300 years.
I've been in a few myself as a native Californian. I have only seen an earthquake once in my life. During Northridge it cracked my house and the neighboring town (Fillmore) had tremendous damage (especially downtown). The next day we drove to Ventura and we were waiting in the car to get someone and an aftershock (about 5.6 I think) hit and we sat in the car watching it.
The road looked like swells of ocean water rising and falling and the windows in the store fronts were flexing in and out (I thought they would break, but they didn't). And the street lights or maybe it was telephone poles were swaying back and forth.
And the weirdest thing I saw were 3 phone booths in a Greyhound bus station parking lot all rising and falling with the earth, It looked like when people do the "wave" at a baseball game, each phone booth would rise up and then the one after it would rise a split second after. It was surreal watching all this. No one was out really and we were the only ones sitting there, it felt very apocalyptic. lol
Alaska had a few bad earth quakes but I don't remember the years or locations. Anchorage comes to mind.
@@Belegalorleave Alaska gets some huge earthquakes. I remember they had something like a 9.0 back in the 80's or 70's. But the areas were more remote so the damage wasn't as bad as when you have ones like we do in California in cities. If Alaska ever starts building more cities that country wouldn't tolerate it and would flatten them! lol Alaska is gonna stay wild forever.
America has the best meteorology schools in the world because it also has the most intense weather in the world. Death Valley is one of the top three hottest places in the world, we get hit by major hurricanes, we have literally ten times more tornadoes in the world than any other country, our blizzards are insane...about the only categories we're routinely beaten in are drought and monsoon flood.
The "big one" that everyone in California is worried about isn't even the largest earthquake North America can experience. Our largest earthquake was the 1964 Alaska Good Friday quake, clocking in at 9.2. It was a megathrust earthquake, meaning it was the same type that can potentially strike the Pacific Northwest at any moment. It triggered landslide tsunamis with extreme runups that struck while the ground was still shaking, and a trans-oceanic tsunami that impacted the entire Pacific basin. The plate boundaries that produce such earthquakes also generally produce the most explosive volcanoes. With the exception of places like Yellowstone.
Don't forget that the same Alaska quake produced a tsunami about 220 ft high. And it scoured the mountain side that it hit.
@@killz0ne215 And that wasn't even the largest tsunami Alaska has ever experienced.
I think that quake would be much better known if it didn't happen(thankfully), in the middle of nowhere, far away from civilization
I'm from a high temp/high humidity area, and I remember standing in Death Valley in the 120s, scoffing, "Whadya mean 'hot'? This ain't hot! Feels like it's in the 80s, man!" not realizing I was sweating out every drop of water my body possessed.
@@mythdefied9070 Yep, I grew up in Fla and the HUMIDITY was oppressive, and I worked outdoors. Went to Colo and almost fainted from dehydration, I didn't feel hot, but the water was leaving, but I didn't notice because I was NOT seeing/feeling sweat cause it evaporated off me very quickly. I found a garden hose quickly and learned my lesson about places with very low humidity and heat. whew
I’ve been through tornadoes in Missouri and Texas, earthquakes in California and Missouri, and hurricanes in Maryland. You live with it and don’t dwell on it. I just make sure any house we live in has a basement or storm shelter. BTW-love your “Memos”.
Let me know where you live now and I will NOT live there, LOL!
What annoys me is when the emergency sirens are abused. Ours goes off not only for air raid alerts and tornado alerts. But also 7am, 11:00am, 12:00pm & 4pm Monday through Friday. Plus when ever an ambulance or firetruck is needed. (Volunteer Fire Department) The only way I know it's an actual tornado alert is if after several minutes the siren hasn't stopped. (It normally takes a few minutes for the volunteers to get to the fire department.)
@@LincolnRon Jesus Christ, that's a waste of time. We have a single test every second Wednesday of the month and than it never gets touched unless a tornado hits.
I was at a church camp in 1972 when hurricane Agnes came through Maryland. We were stuck there for 4 extra days. The result was a lot of spaghetti eating, plenty of strange games and two pregnant 16 year olds. People will find something to do.
The basement won't do you much good if your next disaster happens to be a flood.
Born and raised in Tornado Alley. I can feel it in the air early in the day. Makes my skin tingle. When our kids were growing up and we had watches and warnings I'd just drag their mattresses into our back hall, shut all the bedroom doors and they would just sleep there. I kept watch on great local weather channel and radar until it all blew through. If it was still light outside I loved sitting on the porch watching the storms move through. I love a good storm!!
"It was aliens". Felt that in my soul lol
I’ve lived through so many hurricanes I’ve lost count. There have been tornadoes, snowmageddons and an earthquake in 2010, I believe. And that all happened in suburban Philadelphia, Pa. I guess I’m a crazy weather veteran.
Mother nature has it in for EVERYONE.
But ya.. america.. we do it big..
A couple years ago I was driving through southeastern Colorado and an EF4 twister hit nearby. It was maybe a couple miles south of me, but it was so big that it nearly filled the whole horizon. As there was no place to take any shelter, I just kept driving. Definitely an experience I'll never forget.
We've had some deadly snow blizzards in the midwest also. There's something to research!
From Texas: Tornado warnings are an annual occurrence here, and I've personally had 7 close encounters including one that put our family car in a tree.
Edit: I included the stories in a reply below.
In more detail:
When I was a little kid, a tornado hit our apartment complex. Our apartment was undamaged, but the apartment building across the parking lot was missing a chunk of its roof, and I got to watch our car fall out of the tree it was in. It went on to take the roof off of an Albertson's grocery store.[EF3]
A year later, a tornado touched down next to us while we were driving and was traveling parallel to a couple hundred yards away. We quickly turned around and went the other direction. [It looked like an EF1; I don't remember if I ever heard the official report on it.]
A few years later, a twin vortex tornado touched down within our neighborhood. It was barreling down our street heading directly toward us. Two blocks down, it took a sudden left turn, and missed us. [EF2]
A year after that, a particularly wide tornado stalled on top of my elementary school while we were in class. [EF2]
About a decade later, a tornado destroyed the windshield of my mother's van while we were sleeping. It was parked in our very short driveway. The house was undamaged aside from a damaged fence and a few missing shingles.[EF1]
A couple years later, we were driving near Houston, on the more inland side, when it was hit by a hurricane. The intent was to make a retreat from the vulnerable area. Just as urbanization turned to fields, a total of three weak looking tornadoes touched down all in different directions surrounding us. Thankfully, none of them hit us, but my mother was notably shaken.
Last year, a tornado approached my apartment. I watched it pass by about 4-5 blocks away from my apartment balcony. [EF2]
@@AnasatisTiMiniatis We had one jump over our house when Gilbert came through, and we didn't even know it. We only became aware when we realized all the pets were huddled together in the back of a bedroom closet. These animals basically hated each other normally, so it was quite an eye-opener to find them there and realize what must have happened. The tornado itself was so huge you couldn't really distinguish a proper funnel cloud, so it looked like it was just a really low bank of clouds. But it tore up the airport nearby and wrecked a lot of private planes that had been stored there to protect them from the storm surge on the coast.
@@AnasatisTiMiniatis God loves you 🤯 I'm terrified of tornadoes (even have nightmares of them) and all of this just makes my skin crawl
Fun fact about the land locked state of Colorado: periodically we get what is called hurricane like winds. And they are super annoying.
Breana Wilhelm Last year my town(in Colorado) randomly for a day had winds between 40 and 60 mph and one of the largest trees in town was torn down.
Maybe not annoying, but its a little unnerving when you're on the highway and the semi in front of you is blown off the road and onto it's side
Growing up in Ft. Collins, we'd often get hurricane force linear winds, especially in the spring.
@A.A.Ron Davis imagine dust being driven under every door and window. And not just a little bit; drifts of it. Imagine going out in the yard to remove debris from your property from upwind structures that have been destroyed. Imagine having the doors literally blown out of their frames in the middle of the night.
Yeah, the wind in Colorado can be rather more than "annoying."
Nothing like the classic thunder-snow! So awesome to see in person.