Has anyone ever been in a natural disaster?

I lived in Charleston, SC during Hurricane Hugo. Does that count?

The Blizzard of 2008 :P

Two feet of snow and a few causalities is big news in Columbus, OH.

Nope, the closest I’ve come is I’ve felt two earthquakes in my lifetime, both of them quite weak. One was while I was on the phone with my friend.

My mom was in San Jose during the 1989 earthquake in California. She stood in the doorway as the house shook and things fell off the shelves. She was with my grandmother at a friend’s house. My grandmother’s reaction was to laugh after it happened and my mom was getting pissed off because she had never been more freaked out. Later on, my mom saw the footage of the Bay Bridge collapse and she became a little erratic.

Ok, based on the other answers I assume Hugo counts. :) I was nine at the time, and we couldn’t get out of the city in time. We stayed at a hotel. I remember looking out the window (before the eye passed and the winds shifted) and seeing a trash can fly by our 6th floor window. We stayed in the hallway with a bunch of other people after the winds shifted. I heard windows breaking, and it was scary.

The next day, my super-man Dad jogged to our house, climbing over fallen trees and stuff. We lived in a cul-de-sac. The houses on either side of ours were completely demolished. Our mailbox fell off, but was laying right next to the post and we lost a few shingles. We a ton of trees though.

Power was out for close to a month, and schools were closed. I remember hearing a lot about people flooding their own homes for insurance fraud, but I also remember neighbors coming together to share food, generators, and beds.

We took a 10 day vacation to Disney World.

(we also had a family friend who took the after-math as an opportunity to visit a friend in San Francisco… just in time for the earthquake.)

Hurricane Katrina, it was so fun! We had a hurricane party on our upstairs deck! Clean up was not so fun, though. We ended up with six and a half feet of water in the first story of our house. We live on the bayou so there was about two inches of mud on the floor once the water went out.
Oh, and the no power thing SUCKED! Two weeks with no A/C in Mobile, AL is NOT fun, especially when having to clean up from something like that.

8.0 earthquake

houston 1983 i think…hurricane alicia

Every quake in So Cal since 1974, including the Northridge quake.

6.8 Earthquake in Seattle in 2001. I was on the 13th floor of a historic high-rise in downtown Seattle – which is entirely built on landfill. The building swayed, creaked and groaned and I was terrified.

Unfortunately, Seattle is also overdue for another massive quake registering 9.0 or above and it could happen any day now. Scary.

The same earthquake as @figbash in 2001. I was in the basement of the library at Evergreen in Olympia WA, close to the epicenter. Lights went out, the place shook and shook for 45 seconds. Some people ran out of the building, others like us crawled under our desks—but even at the time, I thought if it was bad enough, we should have gotten out of there while the getting was good. The scariest part was that you really didn’t know if this was the enormous quake expected. But aside from being very frightening, there was some damage to some buildings in town, but no lives lost, and perhaps not a true natural disaster. I hope I never have to be in another big earthquake though.

South Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina. Not fun, but did bring the neighborhood together.