A few days ago, Ma Nature reached down with her lightening fingers and touched off the Mason Gulch wildfire in Colorado, located west of Pueblo. This is a wicked one in that the dry winds keep changing directions, so the fire is spreading in an oblong manner rather than roaring along one path like Hayman did in 2002. Firecrews can't control this until the winds die down, the air cools, rain falls, or some combination of these fully natural events happens. At last report, 8,000 acres had burned with no weather relief in sight.

My take on wildfire has changed dramatically after experiencing Hayman (137,000 acres) and the resulting renewal of the forest, partly through hard human effort, partly through what Ma Nature does anyway.

Each year the Hayman burn area gets better as wild flowers burst out in color, aspen grow from the surviving roots (as does yucca), and the standing burned either get blown down or are cut down. Elk and deer return, along with a few campers who see the beauty of renewal and are aware of the risks (flash floods, falling trees). Many of the lost houses have been replaced. The hills take on a light green patina, promising new pine and fir growth over the coming years.

I'm curious about what natural disasters everyone has experienced, and what your thoughts are about them. Please remember that this is casual conversation, so political takes on people's situations aren't appropriate. Let's just tell stories, okay?

Cool idea for a topic Author Musician

I've had two close calls with mother nature---

Seven years ago, my house got hit by lightning. It was the most bizarre thing. It was an electric storm in the middle of winter. We all woke up at like 3 in the morning from the largest "boom" you can imagine. Lightning had hit the large Catalpa tree next to my house and had jumped to the roof of my house (a part of which is a tin roof). Apparently the tin conducted the lightning through my house and burned out a number of electrial appliances-- but not all (very strange). We lost one of our TVs, all our phones, our water softener and garage door opener. The computer was fine, and I am guessing this is because it was plugged into a surge protector.

When I was a kid in high school, a tornado hit a mile from my home and did enormous damage. I remember driving around the area afterwards-- a truck was in the middle of a bank. It had hit a subdivision and skipped around taking houses out completely. It also destroyed some businesses. A friend had been babysitting in the neighborhood that got hit. The house was completely destroyed but she had gotten herself and the kids to the basement in time.

Tornadoes are the worst and scare me the most of any natural disasters because they are so utterly unpredictable and can form in just a moment's time.

Let's see:

As a kid, I remember playing special footraces during a major hurricane that killed lotsa people along the coast. First we raced upwind, a very slow effort. Then we raced downwind, and that was difficult because of the slick grass and the high speeds we attained. I also set up a bedsheet on a closet pole as a sail and set it into a wagon and went screaming down the street, not getting very far before crashing.

I've been through one killer earthquake. It was actually rather dull; the ground started shaking so hard that I squatted down slightly to keep my balance. I was outside and it all seemed quite benign. The trees and the birds didn't mind or care one bit; it was only humans who were bent out of shape.

I had a major forest fire come within 3 km of my house. We live in the forest and we put a lot of work into maintaining fire safety. That fire safety attitude is an obsession around here; everybody lives and breathes fire zones, access routes, fuel reduction, ladder elimination, and so forth. As a result, not a single home was lost in the huge fires around here over the last few years. I keep my chain saw and my brush hog busy in the runup to fire season. If a fire does come here, I intend that it will be boring in my neighborhood.

No tornados or volcanic eruptions yet; I suppose I haven't really lived.

I've been through several different events in my years and travels, starting with hurricane Donna, in Florida, around 1960. I was just a little kid, and don't remember much except my parents and our next door neighbors sitting up all night playing cards by a hurricane lamp. Somewhere near dawn, the eye of the storm passed over Orlando, and my dad and the neighbor got out his flat bottomed fishing boat, and were able to row up and down the street for a while.

The worst thing, though. was the tornados that came through where I live now, in 1995. There were four altogether, pretty much travelling side-by side.

There was a fantastic lightning storm that night, and I was watching the show outside, when the weather alert went off on the TV, of a tornado sighting in our county. My wife and daughter headed for the basement, and told me to come too, but I wanted to watch the storm a bit longer. A minute later, the lights flickered once and went out, and I heard what sounded like a jet-engine roar outside. I dove for the basement doorway. The nearest tornado was just a block over from our place, and managed only to pull a few shingles from the roof, thank heavens.

They tore up the ball fields at my daughters school, three blocks away, throwing the bleachers into a backyard accross the street, went through a new sub-division a half mile away, destroying a half dozen homes, and then came down in a little town called St. Joseph, about six miles from us, and destroyed literally three quarters of the town. Power was out in our neighborhood for 3 days.

Now, whenever the warnings go off, none of us waits to see what will happen, we all head straight for the basement. Better safe than sorry.

Hum - well in the green and pleasant land of Britain, we don't get much in the way of natural disasters - but up in Scotland we do get very nasty blizzards, which generally cause a few deaths via accidents and I remember as a kid the town I grew up in had a power cut during a particularly bad blizzard. The cut (and blizzard) actually lasted a few days and so we were all regularly marching around to check up on all the older neighbours, bring food to the pensioners etc.

That sort of occurence is generally a freak rather than the norm though...

And just after the blizzard my dad and I climbed a local hill and everything was blanketed in snow. That was fun..

I have two linked stories. At the end, you will see they are more closely linked than they apear to be. (I did at the time.)

In autumn 1987 the South of England was hit by "The Great Storm", which was popularly described as a hurricane. Though some of the gusts got up to hurricane force, I don't think the storm itself qualified as one, hence it's name.

I was a student living in halls of residence (college accomodation, rather than private flats) which were on the seafront in Brighton, Sussex. I think it was a Thursday night, and most of my friends and I were in a nightclub we often went to called The Hungry Years Gathering Place (as far as I know it's still there), which was a rock/metal club at the time (and may weel still be such, if it's still going. Does anybody know?).

There were large windows looking towards the seafront, which were painted out. During the course of the (drunken) evening, I remember these windows smashing as pebbles from the nearby (maybe 300 metres?) beach hit them and the wind then blew them out. I assumed that somebody had thrown them myself, and I think many other people did. This happened quite close to closing time anyway, so most of us left to walk home.

The buildings on the East side of Brighton seafront are effectively along the top of a cliff. The cliff itself and its immediate foot were enclosed in stone and concrete in the 19th century, so there is a road at the top and another road at the bottom, skirting the beach.

I distinctly remember having to walk at a steeply raked angle - leaning very far forward to stay on our feet in the strong wind. And I remember upper storey windows in the houses smashing from wind-blown pebbles as I walked past. I don't remember many, if any, coming anywhere near me. I also remember hearing a crashing sound from the road at the bottom of the cliff, and looking over the rialings to see a Citroen 2CV car bouncing, end over end, all the way along the sea front. I was a little drunk, as I say, so this was merely a source of amusement, rather than anything scary.
The walk was a little under a mile, and I went to bed when I got back. I didn't see or hear anything more myself, though a friend of mine who had a room on the fourth floor of the end terrace house (I was at the back on the second floor, mid-terrace) told me that as he lays in bed he could feel the building moving, and see his furniture slowly moving around his room.

About a month later, also after a heavy night out at the same nightclub (nobody connected any kind of jinx to it for some reason!), the fire alarms went off in the halls buildings (they were the end three houses in a Georgian terrace of five-storey buildings). People knocked on my door to get me out as they came down the staircase (I've always been something of a slugabed, especially at 3.30 AM like on this occasion). I put on a pair of jeans, some boots, and a dressing gown, having slept au naturel that night, and assuming it was some kind of false alarm and that I'd be back in bed inside an hour.

There was no smoke, and nobody mention fire - nobody seemed to know WHAT was going on (even the few that had stayed sober that night!). It was only clear what had happened once we got into the street outside.

A large hole had opened up in the pavement (sidewalk) immediately outside the two end houses. This hole was deep enough so that the removals van one resident had hired to move that weekend was entirely inside the hole, the roof level with the ground around the hole.

Also, the front wall of the end house, and most of it on the one next door, had come away from the building and fallen into the hole. It looked for all the world like a dolls' house with the front taken off. By some miracle, all of the furniture was exactly in place - some rooms had beds, with their sleeping occupants in place, against what had been the wall and what was now a 10 metre drop. In fact, ONLY one injury was sustained - the warden's wife twisted her ankle on the steps on the way out.

By the time we'd taken this all in, the fire brigade had arrived, and they told us it was not safe to go back in, since electrical cables, and sewer and gas pipes has been severed by the subsidance.

In fact, none of us were ever allowed in again, as the building was declared unsafe. After a few weeks, building workers brought out as much of our belongings as was safe to - I lost only a few vinyl records, though that could have been stolen from the storage area, which wasn't very secure.

That was the end of my time in halls of residence.

Once engineers had examined the site, they determined that the Great Storm had helped to weaken the building and the supporting ground. Being chalk, the area had been riddled with old mineworkings to dig out flints for making fire, most dating to the 16th and 17th century before the invention of matches, but some dating back to the Stone Age. The movement of the Great Storm had caused some of these underground chambers to join up, and then collapse, creating the hole into which the van and front wall had fallen.

We were pretty lucky, in the end. If the bhole had been 20 metres further North, the whole building could have collapsed, with 150 drunked students (including me) trapped amid the rubble.

I have never been in a disaster where I felt my life was in danger. But, growing up in southeast Texas, we had a lot of hurricanes, and being a bit inland, near Houston, the damage was always minor compared to the coast. But visiting the coastal areas, I saw some serious damage.
One thing that stuck in my mind like a photograph was acres of houses that appeared to be flooded, but it was too long after a hurricane so it didn't make sense. My father said it was from an un-natural disaster. The pumping of oil and ground water had caused the land to subside and sea water was coming in. The houses were all fairly new and nice, but had to be abandoned.

My parents left me alone for a 10 day vacation to Las Vegas following my 16th birthday. I was working at Baskin Robbins Ice Cream Parlor (my first job) at the time. They had been gone for about a week, and I was heading out to the garage to go to work, when I heard a strange noise. Upon hearing it, something hit me at a primal level, and I ran as fast as possible to my bedroom, and dove under the bed....the door slamming itself shut behind me to the sound of shattering glass. I watched (from under my bed), through the window while the car I had been about to drive to work was thrown over a telephone wire, along with numerous roofs off of other houses.

Through it all I remained strangely calm. The tornado only lasted a few minutes, and when it was over I walked out of what remained of the house, to be greeted by crying and shaking neighbors. Everyone was happy to be alive. I still felt strangely calm, and of course my parents didn't believe me when I called them in Vegas. I had to get the father of a friend (whose house I was staying in after) to convince them that I wasn't pulling a prank and they should come home.

Let's see I have been through a few major and minor hurricanes. One thing that is good about hurricanes is that you know they are coming and can get out of the way if they will be too dangerous.