Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum Options

[belleraphon1]

Sincerely hope all you UMSFers on the West Coast are OK! Read Emily's blog....
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001576/

Widfires and now an earthquake... scary...

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Craig

p.s. With global climate change this forum may get a few posts or two in this century!

[dvandorn]

I was born and raised in central Illinois, not far from where the New Madrid fault passes through that state. Back when I was in my early teens, there was a fairly minor tremblor (something like 5 or less on the Richter scale). I was on the lower floor of our split-level house, and didn't notice a thing. My parents, upstairs, felt the house move a tiny bit. But I felt nothing.

I've been close to disasters and never had them actually impact me in any way. About a year ago, a major highway bridge over the Mississippi River here in Minneapolis collapsed into the river. It was a stretch of the highway I've driven over hundreds of times, had driven over it the day before. But I was a good 15 miles away when it happened.

I've had tornados pass within five miles of my location, in conditions where nothing beyond a wall of black churning cloud was visible from where I was standing.

The apartment building in which I lived for two years at the end of my college career burned to the ground -- seven months after I graduated and moved out.

I've been driving down the highway at 100 km/hr in an old beater car, pulled off to get gas, and had an entire wheel decide to break off the car... after I had slowed down to a crawl.

Some, I'm sure, would say Providence keeps its hand over me, shielding me from danger. As for myself -- I have a vague sense of always being cheated out of seeing and experiencing really exciting things that seem to happen all around me, but never *to* me.

I ought to be glad, I suppose. But I'm not... the more fool, I.

-the other Doug