What weather events have you been in? I was in the great icestorm Ontario/Quebec in about 1998.
I happened to go for a walk that first night. I went around the corner from my house and all the wires were laying al over the road. I turned around and went home. Lasted for a week. My parents had no power and my dad was more concerned about the meat in the freezer thawing than he was worried about himself or my mom. Tons of trees down everywhere. Took forever to clean up from that.
I was in Hurricane Juan in Halifax in about 2003/4. My cat tried to lure me into the closet to hide with him. The city lost quite a few trees that just blew over (Halifax in built on a rock so the roots of big trees do not go so deep).
vibes to all those in tornado alley tonight.
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Hurricane Carla, age- less than a year. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Carla)
Hurricane Cindy, age-2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Cindy_(1963))
Tropical Storm Claudette, age-18 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Claudette_(1979))
Hurricane Alicia, age-22 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Alicia)
Hurricane Chantal, age-28 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Chantal_(1989))
Tropical Storm Allison, age-40 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allison)
Hurricane Rita, age-44 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Rita)
Hurricane Ike, age-48 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike)
Hurricane Ike was by far the scariest, even though Hurricane Alicia was the strongest (where I was fully aware of my surroundings, that is. I was too young to remember anything of the first two, and only have my parents' accounts to go by.)
Tropical Storm Claudette flooded everything, and then TS Allison did it again in 2001. It's so far the only Tropical Storm to have its name retired.
Hurricane Chantal was unique to me mainly because the house I was living in at the time with a friend, I had my bedroom flooded. The only room in the whole house, and mine stuck out far enough from the main body of the house such that Chantal could drive its horizontal rains through the weep-holes in the brick facade. I awoke to the squish of thoroughly soaked carpeting.
I didn't actually go through Hurricane Rita as it veered away from Houston and Galveston at the last minute. But, as this was just one month after Katrina, no one was taking chances and almost everyone in Houston left. After we saw the horror of the freeways of people taking 24 hours or more just to go a three-hour drive to Austin, we said forget it, and sheltered in place. I really wish I had owned some means of portable recording devices back then because the hollow roar of the hurricane in the distance was as eerie as the high-pitched sounds Ike made. And it wasn't freeway noise, either, because they were quite literally empty!
Well, such is life on the Gulf Coast 
because it lost power and then did what it was programmed to do: go to the bottom floor and stop. Being a piece of dumb electronics, it didn't "know" that the ground floor was underwater. So, she couldn't get out and was trapped 
The sunken portions of I-10 and 59 were underwater. The 59 portion just filled up from run-off while the I-10 portion was flooded by White Oak Bayou when it came out of its banks. There's a bend in the bayou near the freeway, and as the floodwaters were raging though, then went up and over that bend and into the freeway. By the time it filled up, all you could see were the tops of tractor-trailer rigs.
At the time, I worked on the northwest side of town and decided to try to get to work once the rains had stopped. Well, I got to my exit and couldn't because all the feeder roads were flooded! I even saw cars in parking lots that were in three feet of water. I had to go way past my exit to turn around and even then, it was flooded, just not so much that I got stuck. The freeway was high and dry, so I went home and called in. But it was weird seeing everything around the main roadway flooded.
A good friend of mine ended up working for the City of Houston by getting a job on the heavy trash pickup work needed in the flooded areas. According to him, six-months of using one of those mini-cranes on a dump-truck, lifting soggy remains of carpeting, drywall and everything else that got flooded. It was a mess for a long time. However, it also spurred the city to build some very large retention ponds and they have helped in preventing subsequent flooding 
was because I was younger and still living with the rest of my family. Plus, we had no large trees around our house due to a tree disease that killed most of them off years before. At the same time, for the week following, we were very busy with our two chainsaws removing trees from neighbors' houses. We lived in Nassau Bay at the time. My father thinks we had a small tornado twist around a maple tree due to how it had been damaged. But other than all that, we only lost a few ridge shingles.
As I recall, they estimated that Hurricane Alicia spawned something like 90-100 tornadoes, in a path that almost literally followed I-45 up to downtown Houston. I guess y'all got one of those. Glad you lived through it without harm
It was the same way with me during Ike. I was thankful that my past-wife and I are still friends, as were txting during it and she was keeping me calm. The gusts were strong enough to shake this 60-year-old brick and stud building.
Our power went out even before the storm had rolled in, and I heard people in the apartments next to us stupidly having a hurricane party. Once the winds really began to blow, they finally figured it out and got inside.
And sharing coffee for everyone after Alicia reminds me of how we also lost electricity and had to use the backyard grills. We all shared our foods and ate a lot of meat that week of no electricity... 
Lived here since '93, but Ivan was the only one we evacuated for in 2004.
Kicked the shit out of the Alabama gulf coast.
Our house was relatively undamaged except for a screened porch.
The dock was totally wrecked.
Same for the bulkhead on the bay.
Lost 19 oak trees upended.
It was a mess.
1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens
