Has anyone experienced a natural disaster 1st hand?
Discussion
This subject came up with some friends in a pub a few months ago. One person mentioned that she had been in an earthquake in Greece. I asked her what it was like, and she said she didn't really know, because she experienced the 'feeling' of it through a friend who was living in Greece, while she was asleep in her bed here, in England.
1994 Sydney Bushfires
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Eastern_seaboard...
Was only young but remember being stuck in a little beach community at my uncles place. 3 roads in and out, but every single one blocked by fire. Had to block the gutters, fill them with water, hose down everything. Constant watch on embers.
I was taken to the beach when the flames got too close.
It was a week with ash constantly raining down and the sky being completely smokey and orange/red in colour.
Had a few other minor fires including one on Christmas Day that had ash falling on a christmas tree - the closest we will ever get to a white Christmas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Eastern_seaboard...
Was only young but remember being stuck in a little beach community at my uncles place. 3 roads in and out, but every single one blocked by fire. Had to block the gutters, fill them with water, hose down everything. Constant watch on embers.
I was taken to the beach when the flames got too close.
It was a week with ash constantly raining down and the sky being completely smokey and orange/red in colour.
Had a few other minor fires including one on Christmas Day that had ash falling on a christmas tree - the closest we will ever get to a white Christmas.
MentalSarcasm said:
Not myself, but if memory serves there are several PHers who were in New Zealand during the earthquake that flattened Christchurch.
Aye. I live in Christhcurch and lived through all the (1000's) quakes including all the big ones. Terrible time , you really cant put it into words.September 2010 7.1 was in the early hours of the morning. The whole house shook for about a minute (this seems longer in the dark..) and felt at the time quite violent (little did we know). Luckily no damage at home and we even had power on, very few did.
Febuary 2011 6.3 I was in work over by the airport in a modern office building. All the ceiling stuff fell out, big aircon units, lights etc. I was crouched under my desk and was shaken so violently I pulled a muscle in my leg trying to stay put. We evacuated the building PDQ and I tried making contact with my wife who works in the CBD central hospital.
For the next 2 hours the ground never once stopped moving.
Not knowing what had happened, where, or how bad, and that work was officially done for a while I jumped in the car headed into the city to pick my wife up. Shortly after we got hit with a series of 5.9's, driving during one of those is like having 4 flats and a crazy person jerking the wheel all over.
The west side of the city isnt to bad. Messed up roads here and there, little bit of damage to bridges.
I get into Hagley park/Riccarton road roundabout and see a block of shops lying across the street - a hint of whats to come.
I get close to the hospital and manage to get in touch with my wife - she works in a windowless office without power or lights it was quite scary. They are evacuating patients into the park, I see hoards of patients with sheets wrapped round them wandering out. I see pickups used as ambulances with people in the back arriving at A&E.
My wife is a pharmacist trained in first aid etc , though doesnt work in pharmacy itself. Pharmacy all the shelves have collapsed stuff everywhere. A&E has no power people everywhere using headtorches. Absolute top respect to everyone working in the hospital that day. My wife elects to stay at work and help out where she can.
So I head home, which is about 15-18kms from the hospical out at Sumner. There is no power, no traffic lights. Roads are chaos gridlocked, I am on empty. I know back routes, most people arnt thinking that way so I get through to a back way home via the hills roads. Closer I get to home the more damage I see - I've not seen the absolute destruction of the CBD at this point.
Part way home I have to pass under a smashed railway bridge that is closed very soon after and takes 2 years to repair.. Luckily I picked this route as the main bridge is almost totalled and closed to all traffic. I sneak through some side roads over the hills to avoid that bit. (main brige reopens in april..)
Because the main bridge is closed but they are allowing people to run over it (not walk) I give a lift to a few people here along the causeway - which has many 1-2 ft wide cracks all along it. glad I have a 4wd.. Plenty of damage here, houses pancaked, walls down roads destroyed. The estuary has a 6ft mud cliff running down the center. I get close to home and there is a ragging waterfall down the hill ( all our clean water supply..) the road up to my home (quite narrow at the best of times) is only just navigable.
I get home about 3.5hrs after the main quake. We are still getting significant aftershocks , several a minute.
I have to force my way into home because every single thing in the entire house is lying smashed on the ground. everything that is breakable is broken. The house to my untrained eye looks ok - cracks in the concrete block but nothing too scary.
I find one of my cats locked solid in the conservatory hadnt moved since the quake catatonic with fright - I give her some cuddles and take her outside, we had 3 cats one we dont see for the next week.
I start trying to clear some stuff up - the entire kitchen is full of broken stuff, draws lept from one side of the room into the fridge on the other.
We have no power, no water, no sewage. We get power back after 5 weeks, water after 6, and sewage takes 6 months.
Pam leaves work with friends, their car is out of fuel so she walks home, I meet her at the ferrymead bridge in our car.
This looks and feels like a disaster movie. Twilight, the tail ends of cars sticking out of holes in the road,liquifaction eevrywhere, alarms going off all over. Crazy.
We spend a horrendous night at home woken by aftershocks every minute. The next day we spend queueing for water!! We have press flying over in helecopters and we now know what it feels like to be those people on the news... Finding food and trying to clean up at home, this takes a week. By then my work is up and running again, and we both spend the next 2 months showering at work, and camping at home.
Because we dont have power we miss most of the coverage about the CBD and the damage, loss of life etc.
The June 6.4 quake almost gets me. A smaller quake closes work so I head home. just as I am waiting in a turn right lane to turn up my hill the 6.4 hits. Thousands of tons of rock close the road meters behind the car. A landslip closes the road up about 30m ahead. My car (foot on the brakes hard) ends up in the left lane. Pam was at home and rides around the lounge on the sofa watching our glass sliding doors (2x3m) turn 90 degrees and embed into the frame. Everything breakable we have replace breaks again.
We have just had our house repaired, still waiting for the drive to be replaced.
This is just the surface overview of my day(s). Theres a lot more, a lot of good community stuff too. But overall I dont recomend the experience.
Edited by RobDickinson on Wednesday 17th September 04:02
RobDickinson said:
Christchurch earthquake stuff
I was backpacking around NZ during this time and we got to Christchurch a couple of months after the earthquakes. I couldn't believe the devastation, it was really sobering.We experienced a couple of aftershocks but nothing nearly on the same level
TheAngryDog said:
Sod visiting New Zealand! Sounds more dangerous than sticking your head in a lions mouth while covered in raw meat.
You think the jetboating and bungee jumping people do here is less dangerous? 
It was a one in 10,000-15,000 year event. But the alpine fault is about overdue and that will go for an 8+....RobDickinson said:
Christchurch earthquake stuff
Wow. Sobering stuff. Thanks for posting. This is one of the powerful things about PH. Someone on here who has experienced such an event just telling us what it was actually like to be on the ground, trying to survive. With no spin or agenda. Thank you.What's life like now? For you and the city's inhabitants? Has it changed society in any way? Are you constantly aware of where you are in case of another earthquake?
RobDickinson said:
Aye. I live in Christhcurch and lived through all the (1000's) quakes including all the big ones. Terrible time , you really cant put it into words.
September 2010 7.1 was in the early hours of the morning. The whole house shook for about a minute (this seems longer in the dark..) and felt at the time quite violent (little did we know). Luckily no damage at home and we even had power on, very few did.
Febuary 2011 6.3 I was in work over by the airport in a modern office building. All the ceiling stuff fell out, big aircon units, lights etc. I was crouched under my desk and was shaken so violently I pulled a muscle in my leg trying to stay put. We evacuated the building PDQ and I tried making contact with my wife who works in the CBD central hospital.
For the next 2 hours the ground never once stopped moving.
Not knowing what had happened, where, or how bad, and that work was officially done for a while I jumped in the car headed into the city to pick my wife up. Shortly after we got hit with a series of 5.9's, driving during one of those is like having 4 flats and a crazy person jerking the wheel all over.
The west side of the city isnt to bad. Messed up roads here and there, little bit of damage to bridges.
I get into Hagley park/Riccarton road roundabout and see a block of shops lying across the street - a hint of whats to come.
I get close to the hospital and manage to get in touch with my wife - she works in a windowless office without power or lights it was quite scary. They are evacuating patients into the park, I see hoards of patients with sheets wrapped round them wandering out. I see pickups used as ambulances with people in the back arriving at A&E.
My wife is a pharmacist trained in first aid etc , though doesnt work in pharmacy itself. Pharmacy all the shelves have collapsed stuff everywhere. A&E has no power people everywhere using headtorches. Absolute top respect to everyone working in the hospital that day. My wife elects to stay at work and help out where she can.
So I head home, which is about 15-18kms from the hospical out at Sumner. There is no power, no traffic lights. Roads are chaos gridlocked, I am on empty. I know back routes, most people arnt thinking that way so I get through to a back way home via the hills roads. Closer I get to home the more damage I see - I've not seen the absolute destruction of the CBD at this point.
Part way home I have to pass under a smashed railway bridge that is closed very soon after and takes 2 years to repair.. Luckily I picked this route as the main bridge is almost totalled and closed to all traffic. I sneak through some side roads over the hills to avoid that bit. (main brige reopens in april..)
Because the main bridge is closed but they are allowing people to run over it (not walk) I give a lift to a few people here along the causeway - which has many 1-2 ft wide cracks all along it. glad I have a 4wd.. Plenty of damage here, houses pancaked, walls down roads destroyed. The estuary has a 6ft mud cliff running down the center. I get close to home and there is a ragging waterfall down the hill ( all our clean water supply..) the road up to my home (quite narrow at the best of times) is only just navigable.
I get home about 3.5hrs after the main quake. We are still getting significant aftershocks , several a minute.
I have to force my way into home because every single thing in the entire house is lying smashed on the ground. everything that is breakable is broken. The house to my untrained eye looks ok - cracks in the concrete block but nothing too scary.
I find one of my cats locked solid in the conservatory hadnt moved since the quake catatonic with fright - I give her some cuddles and take her outside, we had 3 cats one we dont see for the next week.
I start trying to clear some stuff up - the entire kitchen is full of broken stuff, draws lept from one side of the room into the fridge on the other.
We have no power, no water, no sewage. We get power back after 5 weeks, water after 6, and sewage takes 6 months.
Pam leaves work with friends, their car is out of fuel so she walks home, I meet her at the ferrymead bridge in our car.
This looks and feels like a disaster movie. Twilight, the tail ends of cars sticking out of holes in the road,liquifaction eevrywhere, alarms going off all over. Crazy.
We spend a horrendous night at home woken by aftershocks every minute. The next day we spend queueing for water!! We have press flying over in helecopters and we now know what it feels like to be those people on the news... Finding food and trying to clean up at home, this takes a week. By then my work is up and running again, and we both spend the next 2 months showering at work, and camping at home.
Because we dont have power we miss most of the coverage about the CBD and the damage, loss of life etc.
The June 6.4 quake almost gets me. A smaller quake closes work so I head home. just as I am waiting in a turn right lane to turn up my hill the 6.4 hits. Thousands of tons of rock close the road meters behind the car. A landslip closes the road up about 30m ahead. My car (foot on the brakes hard) ends up in the left lane. Pam was at home and rides around the lounge on the sofa watching our glass sliding doors (2x3m) turn 90 degrees and embed into the frame. Everything breakable we have replace breaks again.
We have just had our house repaired, still waiting for the drive to be replaced.
This is just the surface overview of my day(s). Theres a lot more, a lot of good community stuff too. But overall I dont recomend the experience.
Thanks for sharing, that's pretty scary stuff ! September 2010 7.1 was in the early hours of the morning. The whole house shook for about a minute (this seems longer in the dark..) and felt at the time quite violent (little did we know). Luckily no damage at home and we even had power on, very few did.
Febuary 2011 6.3 I was in work over by the airport in a modern office building. All the ceiling stuff fell out, big aircon units, lights etc. I was crouched under my desk and was shaken so violently I pulled a muscle in my leg trying to stay put. We evacuated the building PDQ and I tried making contact with my wife who works in the CBD central hospital.
For the next 2 hours the ground never once stopped moving.
Not knowing what had happened, where, or how bad, and that work was officially done for a while I jumped in the car headed into the city to pick my wife up. Shortly after we got hit with a series of 5.9's, driving during one of those is like having 4 flats and a crazy person jerking the wheel all over.
The west side of the city isnt to bad. Messed up roads here and there, little bit of damage to bridges.
I get into Hagley park/Riccarton road roundabout and see a block of shops lying across the street - a hint of whats to come.
I get close to the hospital and manage to get in touch with my wife - she works in a windowless office without power or lights it was quite scary. They are evacuating patients into the park, I see hoards of patients with sheets wrapped round them wandering out. I see pickups used as ambulances with people in the back arriving at A&E.
My wife is a pharmacist trained in first aid etc , though doesnt work in pharmacy itself. Pharmacy all the shelves have collapsed stuff everywhere. A&E has no power people everywhere using headtorches. Absolute top respect to everyone working in the hospital that day. My wife elects to stay at work and help out where she can.
So I head home, which is about 15-18kms from the hospical out at Sumner. There is no power, no traffic lights. Roads are chaos gridlocked, I am on empty. I know back routes, most people arnt thinking that way so I get through to a back way home via the hills roads. Closer I get to home the more damage I see - I've not seen the absolute destruction of the CBD at this point.
Part way home I have to pass under a smashed railway bridge that is closed very soon after and takes 2 years to repair.. Luckily I picked this route as the main bridge is almost totalled and closed to all traffic. I sneak through some side roads over the hills to avoid that bit. (main brige reopens in april..)
Because the main bridge is closed but they are allowing people to run over it (not walk) I give a lift to a few people here along the causeway - which has many 1-2 ft wide cracks all along it. glad I have a 4wd.. Plenty of damage here, houses pancaked, walls down roads destroyed. The estuary has a 6ft mud cliff running down the center. I get close to home and there is a ragging waterfall down the hill ( all our clean water supply..) the road up to my home (quite narrow at the best of times) is only just navigable.
I get home about 3.5hrs after the main quake. We are still getting significant aftershocks , several a minute.
I have to force my way into home because every single thing in the entire house is lying smashed on the ground. everything that is breakable is broken. The house to my untrained eye looks ok - cracks in the concrete block but nothing too scary.
I find one of my cats locked solid in the conservatory hadnt moved since the quake catatonic with fright - I give her some cuddles and take her outside, we had 3 cats one we dont see for the next week.
I start trying to clear some stuff up - the entire kitchen is full of broken stuff, draws lept from one side of the room into the fridge on the other.
We have no power, no water, no sewage. We get power back after 5 weeks, water after 6, and sewage takes 6 months.
Pam leaves work with friends, their car is out of fuel so she walks home, I meet her at the ferrymead bridge in our car.
This looks and feels like a disaster movie. Twilight, the tail ends of cars sticking out of holes in the road,liquifaction eevrywhere, alarms going off all over. Crazy.
We spend a horrendous night at home woken by aftershocks every minute. The next day we spend queueing for water!! We have press flying over in helecopters and we now know what it feels like to be those people on the news... Finding food and trying to clean up at home, this takes a week. By then my work is up and running again, and we both spend the next 2 months showering at work, and camping at home.
Because we dont have power we miss most of the coverage about the CBD and the damage, loss of life etc.
The June 6.4 quake almost gets me. A smaller quake closes work so I head home. just as I am waiting in a turn right lane to turn up my hill the 6.4 hits. Thousands of tons of rock close the road meters behind the car. A landslip closes the road up about 30m ahead. My car (foot on the brakes hard) ends up in the left lane. Pam was at home and rides around the lounge on the sofa watching our glass sliding doors (2x3m) turn 90 degrees and embed into the frame. Everything breakable we have replace breaks again.
We have just had our house repaired, still waiting for the drive to be replaced.
This is just the surface overview of my day(s). Theres a lot more, a lot of good community stuff too. But overall I dont recomend the experience.
Edited by RobDickinson on Wednesday 17th September 04:02
If you get time to go into the other stuff as mentioned at the end please do.
It's also my understanding that we are due some big earthquakes, Tokyo for example ??
blueg33 said:
Not first hand, but a mate of mine was badly injured in the Thailand boxing day Tsunami. I was in Thailand a couple of weeks later and witnessed the devastation.
The parents of my eldest daughter's best friend lost their son to the Tsunami, they were all on the beach together when it struck and he was ripped from his Mother's hand never to be seen again. He was about five years old at the time. Lovely people, so sad, the poor, poor, buggers. 
We were stood in Sutter St. San Francisco back in Oct 11 when there was a 3.8 magnitude, 25 second long quake going on.
To be honest I didn't twig it at first, It felt like being pissed, a proper little wobble going on.
Light damage all over the city but it was fun finding cracked mis-aligned pavements, fallen masonry, and some doors that wouldn't open that used to the day before.
To be honest I didn't twig it at first, It felt like being pissed, a proper little wobble going on.
Light damage all over the city but it was fun finding cracked mis-aligned pavements, fallen masonry, and some doors that wouldn't open that used to the day before.
CedGTV said:
We were stood in Sutter St. San Francisco back in Oct 11 when there was a 3.8 magnitude, 25 second long quake going on.
To be honest I didn't twig it at first, It felt like being pissed, a proper little wobble going on.
Light damage all over the city but it was fun finding cracked mis-aligned pavements, fallen masonry, and some doors that wouldn't open that used to the day before.
This is exactly how I felt... Feeling of being slightly tipsy but what struck me the most was the thunder like noise before anything else! Very strange feeling indeed.To be honest I didn't twig it at first, It felt like being pissed, a proper little wobble going on.
Light damage all over the city but it was fun finding cracked mis-aligned pavements, fallen masonry, and some doors that wouldn't open that used to the day before.
Small quakes when they are farish away feel very rolly
We got to a point where we could tell what magnitude , which fault line and how far away they were.
Anything lower than a 5 and we barely blinked. Its been quiet for a while so a 4+ gets the heart going. We had a 4.2 last week but I didnt feel it.. you can see what we have had on this cool website. http://www.canterburyquakelive.co.nz/
As for the community things..
Plenty of local community centers with food and water, hand sanitisers, portaloos on every street corner.
What really made a difference though was how the students formed the student army and helped anyone and everyone, day in day out shoveling liquefaction etc. The farmers came in with machinery etc to help. There was a baking army too cooking and transporting in food for everyone.
The city was pretty much split into east and west(shower city).
4 years on and my commute is still almost total roadworks the whole way until I get to the west side.
We got to a point where we could tell what magnitude , which fault line and how far away they were.
Anything lower than a 5 and we barely blinked. Its been quiet for a while so a 4+ gets the heart going. We had a 4.2 last week but I didnt feel it.. you can see what we have had on this cool website. http://www.canterburyquakelive.co.nz/
As for the community things..
Plenty of local community centers with food and water, hand sanitisers, portaloos on every street corner.
What really made a difference though was how the students formed the student army and helped anyone and everyone, day in day out shoveling liquefaction etc. The farmers came in with machinery etc to help. There was a baking army too cooking and transporting in food for everyone.
The city was pretty much split into east and west(shower city).
4 years on and my commute is still almost total roadworks the whole way until I get to the west side.
I was in Wordsley for one of the numerous mini-earthquakes, felt like the rumbling of a lorry going past.
I also converted several 4x4 haters when I got them home during one of the floods in Worcester the flooding in Worcester always shocked me, couldn't believe how high the waters could get!
I also converted several 4x4 haters when I got them home during one of the floods in Worcester
the flooding in Worcester always shocked me, couldn't believe how high the waters could get!I worked on a Scout campsite in the US in 1979, we were at one end of the site and there was a load of wind and heavy rain, but we thought it was just as storm so sheltered and waited for it to pass.
As we walked from the end of the site back to the buildings we started seeing trees down and realised it was a bit more than that, turned out to be a tornado.
One of the guys that worked with the boats on the other side of the lake was missing and some of us who were good swimmers were sent over to join the search (I was chucked the keys to a Gremlin (AMC?) and set off. On the way back the mechanical clutch linkage fell apart and I drove it back clutchless changing and using the key for stop and start; slight panic as a met a big JCB type thing on a blind bend! Afterward the owner asked if I’d driven a stick shift before – being British, yes of course I bloody had, in fact I’d never driven an auto.)
Anyway, when we got over the other side the dinghys and canoes had been lifted off the beach and were floating around the lake, mostly upside down. This wasn’t a boating pool, more like one of the smaller Lake district lakes.
Search parties were sweeping the shore in a long line, we got in the lake and were duck diving under the boats to see if he was under there. I didn’t find him, the shore party found him crushed under a tree 
Not too much concern for Health and Safety in those days/circumstances, we’d have had to do a risk assessment and pass a swimming course these days before we could go in the water an look for him.
One of the kids was killed as well, can’t remember the details of that as I wasn’t directly involved.
The next day the National Guard turned up with a load of heavy lifting gear, we’d been clearing trees off roads with a felling axe and manual labour.
As we walked from the end of the site back to the buildings we started seeing trees down and realised it was a bit more than that, turned out to be a tornado.
One of the guys that worked with the boats on the other side of the lake was missing and some of us who were good swimmers were sent over to join the search (I was chucked the keys to a Gremlin (AMC?) and set off. On the way back the mechanical clutch linkage fell apart and I drove it back clutchless changing and using the key for stop and start; slight panic as a met a big JCB type thing on a blind bend! Afterward the owner asked if I’d driven a stick shift before – being British, yes of course I bloody had, in fact I’d never driven an auto.)
Anyway, when we got over the other side the dinghys and canoes had been lifted off the beach and were floating around the lake, mostly upside down. This wasn’t a boating pool, more like one of the smaller Lake district lakes.
Search parties were sweeping the shore in a long line, we got in the lake and were duck diving under the boats to see if he was under there. I didn’t find him, the shore party found him crushed under a tree 
Not too much concern for Health and Safety in those days/circumstances, we’d have had to do a risk assessment and pass a swimming course these days before we could go in the water an look for him.
One of the kids was killed as well, can’t remember the details of that as I wasn’t directly involved.
The next day the National Guard turned up with a load of heavy lifting gear, we’d been clearing trees off roads with a felling axe and manual labour.
Adenauer said:
blueg33 said:
Not first hand, but a mate of mine was badly injured in the Thailand boxing day Tsunami. I was in Thailand a couple of weeks later and witnessed the devastation.
The parents of my eldest daughter's best friend lost their son to the Tsunami, they were all on the beach together when it struck and he was ripped from his Mother's hand never to be seen again. He was about five years old at the time. Lovely people, so sad, the poor, poor, buggers. My mates story is pretty incredible, he nearly lost both his hands, he was found uncoscious at the side of a road half a mile from his hotel room (he was swept put of that) by his brother.
When we were out there a couple of weeks later, there were so many Brits there looking for lost family and friends
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