1.What type of natural disasters happen in your area?
We do get tornadoes here sometimes—also flooding near the rivers if we're speaking about the more general area.
2. What sort of natural disasters have you been through/witnessed? How bad were they (add richter scale, category, etc if you know/want!)
North Carolina experienced a nasty outbreak of 30 tornadoes (some of which got up to category EF-3 I think) in April 2011. We weren't directly impacted, but it was a terrifying day, and a lot of people got hurt or killed. My mom was still at her old workplace at the time, so we were super worried about her and vice versa.
On other occasions we've also had tornadoes get within a few miles of our house, close enough for the sky to get eerily dark for midday, and early one morning one was close enough that I could actually hear the telltale "train sound", so those were... not fun times.
These are very unusual for our area, but we did also experience a very mild earthquake once. I remember just being kinda confused as to why my desk suddenly started shaking.
3. How much do they scare you? How do you cope with this fear?
A lot honestly, I regularly experience bad weather nightmares about tornadoes and I don't like the times of year when they become more common.
Tornadoes tend to like flat areas and roads, so I do take some comfort in not living in their ideal terrain. Although, I'm not sure how I really cope with it exactly, because I tend to mainly respond to these sorts of emergency situations after the fact. Like,
(although this could also be that my priorities are just. very skewed), when a tornado gets really close, once the cats are safe I usually start grabbing my
stuff, with an entirely too cocky attitude of "if it gets
really close, I think I can still book it to the closet in time"
.
My parents hate that I do this and that's fair tbh, please do not be like me.
Then once the situation is over I'll get super shaken up lmao
4. What sort of natural disaster fascinates you most?
Volcanic eruptions, maybe? But I don't think I'm really fascinated by any of them. I'm not sure I experience anything beyond my fear and dislike of them.