1 Yep.  Where I am in Sydney, I had nothing to worry about in the recent floods, earthquakes are almost unknown, and storms are unlikely to do more than break some windows and dislodge a few roof tiles.  And the local volcano has been extinct so long that even the "blue metal" quarry dug out of it has been abandoned.

Bushfires, though, are a real danger.

Plus of course this is Australia, where every living thing wants to kill you and wear you as a hat.

2 We had very major flooding in 1953 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953), but now we probably have the best flood protection in the world.

Nothing major has happened in terms of natural disasters since I was born though.

3 Tornadoes and snowstorms are the main fears here at Pond Central, and neither are particularly worrisome.  Duckford proper hasn't been hit by a twister directly in... maybe ever, though the "suburbs" have, including one the week of Thanksgiving a couple years back. 

We usually get one big snowfall a year, but it's never anything TERRIBLE... 16" is a lot of snow, but it's still navigable... and that's the heaviest fall we've had since 1982.

It's no Minnesota, that's for sure.

4 Down here in Florida, of course, the Big Threat is hurricanes, but at least hurricanes are polite enough to give plenty of warning of their arrival (thanks to today's technology).  If you get caught in a hurricane, it's pretty much your fault.  Tornados are pretty tame down here compared to some places I've lived (Ohio), but I still find them more worrisome simply because of their unpredictability.

5 Up here in Maryland, hmm. . . I don't think we really have any singular natural disaster type.  Flooding sometimes happens along rivers and shorelines, but not that often.  Storms are a problem, though mostly along the coast.  We get tornadoes.

The big worry is that a major hurricane will head right up the Chesapeake, which would be a catastrophe, but its pretty rare.

6

Hmm, I thought if you live in the NW close to the coast you were also in danger of giant tsunamis.

I live in Austin, TX and the we're too far south for tornadoes and blizzards, too far inland for hurricanes, no volcanos anywhere closeand the local fault is inactive.The most serious threat here is allergies.

7 At this time of year, I remember that I'm east of Greensburg, west of Andover, south of Hesston, north of Moore (Oklahoma) and within an easy drive of Udall. So far I've been lucky. About 10 years ago there was an F4 10 miles due south of me heading due north. It swerved before it got much closer, but not before toppling a friend's old tree onto her roof.

8

There are unusual threats everywhere. You don't think of Oregon as being the target of cyclones, but we got one in 1962.

My family was living in a trailer house on a lot we bought, while we built a house there. My dad designed the house, and he built it, evenings and weekends and vacations. My grandfather (a building foreman) came up all the time and helped, and sometimes other family friends would show up and work. My older brother helped a lot, and I helped as much as a 3rd grader can, which wasn't much.

We had the frame up, and it was all covered with plywood, but none of the internal partitions were in place yet. Then that storm hit. It picked up the roof and carried it about 75 feet and then dropped it on the ground.

It took us weeks to recover. We had to tear it all apart again, salvage as much of the lumber as we could, and buy replacements for all that was wrecked, and then put it all up again.

The Columbus Day Storm was a major disaster for this part of the country, mostly because such storms are incredibly rare. It's about like having a hurricane hitting Ireland -- it just doesn't happen. Except that in extremely freakish circumstances it can.

It took months before everything was back to normal. The phone company had crews in from most of the western half of the US restringing wire, and the power companies did the same.

There are places where you expect certain kinds of disasters. When you think Earthquake, you probably think California. But there's a huge fault in Missouri which has gone off in recorded history, and will again. When I think volcanoes, I think here, or Hawaii, or Iceland, or Japan. I don't think Wyoming. But the Yellowstone Caldera is a volcano which has explosive eruptions that make all those others look tiny. It doesn't go off very often (I think the period was 600,000 years) but it's due pretty soon, and when it happens it's going to devastate a large part of North America.

When I moved to Boston, I didn't expect hurricanes. But there were two while I lived there.

9 In the Philly area, we have a wide variety of rare possible natural disasters.  The most common is probably a Hurricane (or at least the remnants of one).  Back in 99 (or 2000), my appartment complex was evacuated because of massive flooding from Hurricane Floyd.  The hurricane itself wasn't really dangerous, but my apartment was in a weird location that flooded easily.  I stayed at a friend's house that night, and when I came back the next morning there were cars that had floated away, and some that had landed on top of each other.  First floor apartments were demolished.

We get the occasional tornado (nothing excessive) and we even had an earthquake last year (it was the damnedest thing... we only got a small bit of it, and it only lasted a couple seconds - no one realized what it was until it was over).

10 When I was in my early teens (and much thinner) I was at a local fair ground when a tornado passed just overhead.  It took the top car off the Ferris wheel, which (thanks to the warning siren) they had time to shutdown  and evacuate.  The car was found the next morning a half mile away.

The tent I was in collapsed, so I foolishly took off running towards another tent a hundred yards away.  The wind caught me me in mid-stride and my next foot did not touch ground.  Luckily, I was grabbed by a very large man who was less aerodynamic than me, and he kept me grounded until the wind subsided.

11

Watching Mt. St. Helens erupt was spectacular, and awe-inspiring, but it wasn't particularly scary. The wind was blowing away from us, so we could clearly see the ash cloud which we didn't get any of.

Going through a 7.2 earthquake in San Diego one morning was interesting, but didn't really terrify me much. The epicenter was more than a hundred miles away, so my chandelier and venetian blinds swayed back and forth a lot, but nothing got broken. What was strangest about that one was how long it lasted. It was something like 3 minutes. But the ground motion was a slow sine wave, maybe 3-4 seconds period.

I think I was too young to really understand how scary the Columbus Day Storm really was, even during the time when we walked through it to go to the house next door. After our house blew down, my parents began to worry that the wind might topple our trailer, so we bailed out. My older brother walked alone. My dad carried my younger sister. I walked next to my mom, who held onto my hand very strongly, to the point where it almost hurt.

The flood in Corvallis had me a bit worried for a while, but that's really all it amounted to.

I haven't been through a natural disaster which outright terrified me. In fact, I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I was genuinely terrified. And I guess I'm lucky for that.

12 I never was in a natural disaster period, but my life was in danger from the street crime a few times. The only weather hazard that Central Russia offers is freezing, which is easy to control. Just pile things up and keep to shelter.

13 I've never been through one that terrified me, but there was this storm a while back that kept me kind of worried for a few days....

14

Yeah, Ubu, but there was a special reason why.

Pete, I thought you were from St. Petersburg. Am I remembering wrong? (Or did you serve in central Russia when you were in the army?)

15 My father's side of the family is from St.Petersburg and I spent months at a time there. My mother is from Irkutsk. But we lived in Moscow region.

St.Petersburg is famous for floods, and they eventually built a giant dam going across the Bay of Finland that protects the city. I never was there when it flooded.

16 During the Xenia tornado in Ohio, my sister and I (we were both in grade school) tried to make a shelter inside our house using giant tinkertoys.

17 I used to live (probably) within a few miles of Don.  Tornadoes were the scary du jour at this time of the year.  My best friend's house at the time was next to the Andover trailer park, and standing on his roof the day after that horrific tornado was... memorable.  Until then, I never realized the main threat of the storm was the soup of 200MPH shrapnel flying everywhere.

I will note that the tornado you see is not nearly as scary* as the one which the news says is right on top of you, and you cannot see anything.  (*unless it is heading toward you, of course).

Now I live in Colorado, a few miles NW of Denver (in Broomfield, if anyone cares).  Things seem pretty calm here, although we are still ostensibly at risk of tornadoes.

18

I've lived my whole life in ND/MN.

When I was a kid, we went camping, and lightning struck a power pole near our campsite.  Everything looked white for a couple seconds, and when I started thinking again, I was standing a good 10 feet from where I (thought I) was when the bolt hit.

Attended UND; in 5 years the university closed up shop 10 days, 5 for "there's too dang much snow" and 5 for "the windchill is too low to let students walk around outdoors".

Then the Red River of the North flood in 1997 leveled the whole town (whole region, really... the normally-40-yards wide river was covering 10-20 miles since the Red River "valley" is flat.  Ruler-flat.  Tsundere-imouto-flat.)

Moved to Minneapolis after college that year, and within a year had a tornado rip the shingles off my apartment building and the whole roof off the adjacent one.

I'm hoping that's enough disasters for one lifetime...

19 Steven, not denying that if it had been possible, we'd have evacuated, but remember, we weren't certain how the storm surge would go, and the windspeeds were right around the point where roofs start coming off and garage doors get punched in.  And a lot of that happened. 

I still wish I'd gone outside and looked up when the eye passed over, but whomever said the winds are calm in an eye meant "relatively."