What Kind of Natural Disasters Occur Where You Live? And How Have You Prepared for Them?

My parents and I live in a rural area on the west coast. It's all about wildfire, baby. (Maybe earthquakes might be a problem but we're far enough inland that we don't usually see any.)

We've had to massively step up our fire break game, to the point of purchasing a larger brush cutter for our tractor to handle it all. Every fence line has a 50ft wide cut on either side and roughly 40 acres around the house itself is cut to bare dirt.

We've limbed all the pine trees near the house up to about 18-20ft off the ground, and taken out a lot of young trees that would provide ladder fuel. Any of the trees within a few hundred feet of our house get watered 3-4 times during the summer to keep their moisture content up.

We have a 250gal, 21hp wildland fire pump that lives on the back of our winter feed truck from May until October. It can spray about 80 feet...
We also maintain an 7500gal swimming pool with the filter pump plumbed up to act as a transfer pump into the fire rig for quick refilling.

Additionally, my dad added two large rain bird sprinklers to the roof of our house that can each dump about 8 gallons a minute of water out from our well, maintaining a wet zone about 20ft around all sides of the house, which has concrete fire-resistant hardiboard siding on it. The well itself is also set up to run from a propane backup generator if the power company cuts service during a fire.

There's really not much else we can do beyond having our critical documents in a briefcase and praying.

None. Chicago doesn't flood, have earthquakes, get wildfires, get hurricanes, get droughts. Tornados dissipate once they hit the urban heat bubble. It barely even blizzards here, once or twice a year at most.

True, we did burn down once. But now we're very aggressive about fire safety and prevention.

The Salt Lake Valley is expecting "the big one" (earthquake) anytime. There is a greater than 40% chance of a 6.75+ earthquake along the Wasatch fault within the next 50 years. 80% of Utah's population lives along the front including the fault. Because the valley is an old lakebed, that means much of the ground would experience liquefaction. Approximately 140,000 buildings wouldn't be ready for it. It'd be pretty bad. One source, but the best is a government report from years back detailing how bad it could be.

When living out bush in Australia forrest fires and floods are a real threat. My prep was the tried and true method of "she'll be right mate".

Here in Seattle, the main scary natural disasters are earthquakes. We haven't had a major one since 2001 or so, but supposedly there's a massive one coming relatively soon.

Heat waves are basically the only serious thing here. There isn't really much to surviving them for the average person. Stay where it's cool, stay hydrated, don't over exert yourself in the heat. All really easy things to do if you have a reasonable amount of security in your life. Most don't bother except maybe making sure to contact elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives.

Preparation is needed if you're not financially secure. Maybe you're homeless, maybe you're too broke too cool your home, maybe a lot of things. I've been there before. To this day I'm still aware of places I can find shelter across the city and how to get to them, with and without public transport, in a hurry.

Mostly the answer is libraries but it depends where you are in the sprawl and how bad the heat wave is. They're great during business hours but they can close before things cool down. I learned to get really good at loitering in shops and other private places while expending as little as possible without them moving me on.

Also where to get potable drinking water for free, you'll be surprised how hard it can be to find in a pinch.

Edit: I forgot an underrated and personal favorite method from those days - trains.

Before everything went electronic it was really easy to travel free without the stereotypical methods of fair evading, so you could relax when inspectors were on. I'd find a train with functioning air conditioning on one of the 'safe' lines and just ride it for the whole round trip back to the central station then find a new one. Outside of peak hour it would be dead quiet and I could read or sleep in peace, and they go till late.

If you're curious about the fair evasion method, the old tickets were just small bits of plastic-y cardboard with a magnetic strip on the back. Ticket machines would read the magnetic strip, write to it and mark down a trip in ink on the front of the ticket. If the magnetic strip ever failed they'd still honor the ticket and use the marks on the front to determine how many trips you were owed.

All you had to do was stop it being inked (or remove it). The tolerances on the machines were quite large so you could easily just put a bit of tape on the front and peel it off after to have an unmarked ticket. If you were desperate, you could sometimes rub it off anyway. Then all you needed to do was run a magnet over the magnetic strip or bend the ticket until it was damaged in the right way for a "fresh" but broken ticket. You'd then exchange it as a broken one and have a new ticket. If inspectors ever came around while you had a broken one they'd just tell you to take it in and leave you be.

This way you'd theoretically only ever need to buy one ticket, though it was still advisable to pay when you could or fair evade other ways to avoid become a regular at the service stand. My mother was an alcoholic and my father a deadbeat so this was how I made it to school for years.

I'm sure there is some trick with the new electronic cards but I've been fortunate enough to not need to work that out since they came in.

Tornados, sometimes, I guess? I've got a chair on the front porch to watch from, does that count as prepared?

It used to be blizzards in the DC area, but with global warming, I haven't seen one since 2016. Hurricanes and tornadoes are rare, but do happen. I suspect hurricanes will become more common. I have rapid "go to bags" and some canned supplies. Generally, with hurricanes you get ample warning. We also have places to go in Appalachia (relatives), so we wouldn't have to shelter.

Western Australia. Wildfires. I prepare by slathering myself in bbq sauce.

Most posters are talking about what natural disasters they experience and less about preparedness, so I’m going to take the preparedness angle:

1. We have a go bag with medical supplies, very basic survival equipment, and non-perishable food.
2. We have enough non-perishable food at home for my wife and I for about 3 months
3. We have enough water for a week, and lifestraws to use local water supplies after that.
4. We have basic survival things like hand crank chargers/radios, solar batteries, thermal blankets, etc.
5. In the case of man made disaster (nuclear war) we have iodine pills.

My take on survival stuff is to be prepared but not be a prepper. Some folks take this way too far. I feel everyone who builds a bunker and has a years worth of food is going to have someone fall flat on their house and it won’t matter anyway. That being said, I want to have enough to comfortably survive a week-month, and then after that things would be so fucked that all bets are off anyway.

Republican Governance. It is natural that it'll be a disaster.

We just had a "once every 100-years" storm surge last fall. Many islands in the southern Danish archipelago were not properly prepared and saw their dikes flood (including my birthplace, and yes, I know others have so much worse conditions, but we are/were rather well protected here in the Baltic sea). There was some damage, not least to some endangered species habitats that the Copenhagen zoo was keeping, and many islands will have to seek an exception with the cultural preserverance agency to be allowed to repair their dikes.

On the bright side, the flood has seen to the fire and flood equipment being checked, meaning that we now have proper portable flood pumps. Even though they at first sent pumps too large to be loaded onto the ferry. Derp. :)

Hopefully this will not repeat for another 100 years, but many of us islanders are not so sure with global warming, so we might have to evacuate and give up the smaller islands within my lifetime if such floods become a common occurance.

And of course we could just replace our 200+ year old dirt and stone dikes and less old water locks with modern concrete and steel dikes, but I think we'll have a hard time convincing the state to put in the required resources for a <10 people community. Even Ærø, one of the larger islands with a population of ~6000, has had problems with dike maintenance.

I guess my advice would be the normal stuff: keep some bottled water and long term food that can be eaten cold, keep a battery bank for your phone, blankets and a bucket, know how to get to your rooftop when in the attic (will hopefully never be necessary in the baltic sea), have a good pair of waders and a good flashlight. And of course, know how to quickly contact any other inhabitants in your local area if necessary.

Got non perishable food for about a week at home.

-40 temperatures every few years. I live in an apartment so I'm not allowed to install a fireplace and can't really make changes to the heating system. Got a heap of candles that could keep a small room above freezing for a day or two.

Excessive amounts of snow. 4WD and can work remotely.

Aside from the Big One (for which I've been meaning to make an emergency kit but keep putting off because reasons), we get really bad wildfires now on the west coast so before every summer I load up my inhaler and nasal spray, then I proceed to not go outside for 3 or 4 weeks because outside air bad. Thanks lungs. Thankfully I don't live where the fires are normally happening, just in the vicinity. if I did, the above mentioned nonexistent emergency kit could be made fireproof and double up for preparedness.

Droughts, hurricanes and theoretically earthquakes. Last actually disastrous earthquake was about 700 years ago though, so I dont worry about those. Last huge hurricane was in 1999. I haven't really prepared against natural disasters in particular, though I do have some food and water stockpiled.

Wildfires and flooding here in northern Ontario. Can’t really prepare for these things… Just pack up and go when needed. Wildfire got real close to town last summer, and MNRF were beginning to setup sprinklers around town, but eventually the fire was taken care of. We were ready to pack up and go if the time came, but luckily never needed to.

Mostly tropical cyclones in Hong Kong. Not much has to be done when there's one, except staying at home.

But last year we got hit by a 1-in-500-year rainstorm. Due to people not really expecting much damage from a storm, it caused a lot of damage.

Droughts and bushfires are the two biggest worries here. We get occasional floods, but those occur more often in surrounding towns where the local councils haven't done anything in years to clear out the riverbeds.

Half of my home town of Xenia Ohio was wiped off the map in the 1974 Super Outbreak.

Best bet is to buy a house with a basement and hope its enough.

Floods, generally

Generally the houses are old enough that they're from before we forgot that building on floodplains is a bad and that entrances should be perpendicular to the slope, and when every few years we'll get a day with 200mm of rainfall these houses are generally fine even if some roads get ripped up and swept away, but the new houses that get designed by people hundreds of miles away who think the 1500mm of annual rain they get is as much as anywhere could possibly get (try twice to quadruple that...) often get absolutely destroyed

People also generally have 4x4s as you will need something raised to get through roads sometimes, or to pull people who don't out

I live in North Texas. We get everything other than volcanoes. We have tornados, earthquakes, and hurricanes can even make it this far in land from the Gulf of Mexico. Plus excessive heat-waves and since 2020 artic blasts. Plus if we're not experiencing a drought there will be flash floods.

Basically, thanks to 25 years of Republican control the state is not prepared for jack shit. My current disaster prep is limited to savings as much money as I can, so I can move out of this state this summer.

Japan Earthquake back in 2011

Blizzards mostly, that can be solved with a heat source and thick clothing. Even right now I am dressed like an ice climber. This is normal.

Earthquakes are the only things I've ever had to worry about where I live. The preparation other than basics for any emergency is (hopefully) handled by the construction companies that built my home and the surrounding buildings, since this is California and making buildings earthquake proof is a requirement here. Unless a super quake hits or something. Then I plan to move to the Eastern coast of the state. 😎