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When Hurricane Ike hit Houston in 2008, we decided not to evacuate. I had evacuated from Hurricane Rita a few years before and remember the god-awful traffic. I spent 2-3 hours putting up my corrugated metal window/door coverings that looked similar to these. I put our air mattress in the walk-in closet, brought the radio, some flashlights, and food in there with us, and we hunkered down. The power went off around 9 PM. The wind was extremely fierce from 10 PM to midnight. Loud bangs of stuff hitting the house and the metal window covers. Around midnight, it got eerily quiet, which we figured was the eye of the hurricane passing over. I went into the backyard with a flashlight and noticed sections of our fence were down. The neighbors, too. It was an odd, greenish light that night. I can't really describe it, but it was odd. I checked on my other neighbor that stayed and then went back in when the rain started. Over the next hour or so, the wind picked up again, but I fell asleep and missed the rest of the hurricane. Damage was minimal, thankfully. I only had to replace a few sections of fence. The roof was fine, which I attribute to having a 1 story house between two 2 story houses which both had roof damage. Most of the damage in our neighborhood was due to the storm ripping out your satellite dish (direct TV) , or someone's satellite dish hitting your house!

My manufacturing plant was another story. I went to work that Sunday to help assess the damage. I took pictures all over the plant and helped coordinate with the rest of the group to decide what was priority, etc. All in all, there was over a million in damages. Most of it was our dock on the Houston Ship Channel where we received barges of raw material. The barge company couldn't get the barge out before they locked down the HSC. The barge was lifted by the rising water, floated over the dock, and then remained on top of the dock when the water subsided. It then flipped over, dropping our excavator into the channel and caused the Coast Guard to get up our asses to get that "Damn tractor and barge the hell out of ship channel."

Heres an "Oh, crap, there I was" story from Mississippi in March. We were camped out, I and my 5 thousand closest friends, chilling out BSing under my household pavilion. Had some light rain all afternoon. Temp started dropping. Quickly. Well some of us grab what little cool weather gear we had, the forecast for the week said nothing below mid 60s, a very warm Gulf War. Wind starts to pick up. Note none of us have phones on since there isn't anywhere to charge them for a week so we did not receive any warnings aside from a morning weather forecast for rain in the afternoon.

Very quickly the rain really kicks in, followed by wind. Soon we are getting 60 to 100 mile an hour gusts and constant 40-50 wind speeds. Mundane tent one collapses. All but three of us run to the most heavy tent in camp which is a car port with a painted tarp to make it look like a medieval German house.

So the three of us continue to stand or sit under the tarp. I had a sprained ankle(still do), one guy blew out his knee in the fighting earlier that day and with the rain going sideways none of us were dry at this point. He had his head in between the third person's rather large bosoms and she was hugging and covering him to keep him warm. I was drinking a beer watching tents go down thinking this was awesome as I shivered.

Mundane tent two, the knee guy's tent, goes down with tent poles sticking through the fabric of the tent. My tent in the back corner was fighting hard but staying up. Period tent one goes down followed by the one next to it. The one next beside it doesn't go down but the sides rip from the stakes and in comes the rain.

Meanwhile we have lightning all around us, one bolt hit a tree less than 100m away. No I know you are saying why didn't we get into cover. Where? The pavilion we were under had large wooden center poles and wooden side stakes. The car port tent was all aluminum frame and was taller than our pavilion.

Got really dark and the rain and wind picked up even more. In camps all around us we had tents dropping. In the aftermath we wandered around to help and found there was one elderly woman and her grand kid in a mundane tent that literally got picked off the ground and thrown 30 feet in the air, they were shaken but unharmed.

Then as fast as the storm hit, it was gone, replaced by a pounding rain for about a half hour and it too went away.

Apparently a tornado touched down less than a quarter mile from our camp. My household camp site backed up against a tree line was partially protected from the wind. We put the side stakes back up on the pavilion and I grabbed some warm dry clothes. My CERT mentality went into effect and I started going around assisting where I could with my bad foot's boot laced up tightly.

Out of my camp, we lost about half the tents, all the mundane tents were total losses. The period tents were mostly just wet. My Soulpad tent(that's really the name) had no issues except I had my window flaps open on the bottom in the back and I had a lake under my air mattress.

We got lucky. After wandering around awhile, we found one site that was a 100% loss. They also had a car port tent set up as a chow hall area. It was completely bent up like a rearing cobra or an S with one end high in the air and the other firmly staked down. Oddly enough the tables and chairs under it were in perfect order and didn't move. I would say about 60-70% of the total site's tents were knocked down or destroyed.

Worst injuries were a concussion from collapsing tent where the center pole hit the girl in the head. Theres debate that it might have been more to her alcohol levels than the pole but I don't know the details. There were multiple cases of hypothermia in 50 degree weather with everyone being wet and cold.

In some of the camps people were making a game of it and were sliding across camps like a slip and slide. Fun times.

Nothing beats being on a 350' ship and sailing between 2 typhoons. People were bouncing off the walls or tied into their beds and the puke was flowing higher than the waves.

except being on a small island being hit with an 8.2 earthquake and the horrible waiting to see if a tidal wave comes for you next. There was no tidal wave, just after shocks for a week still getting into the 7's.

I'd complain about the wildfires in san diego, but they got me a week off from work as the air was so bad they didn't want people going outside.

Here in Michigan most of the bad weather stories take place in winter. We get a couple of pretty bad winter storms a year with high winds thanks to the great lakes. The most recent I had was in January, I was driving a big ol straight truck doing deliveries. I'm on the east coast and a blizzard rolls in dumping several inches an hour and wind blowing like crazy. At one point I'm driving probably 5mph because any faster and my tires brakes loose and a gust hits so hard the back end of my truck starts to come around. So now I'm sliding sideways with a few tons of random junk in the back towards a 10ft drainage ditch.

It was too slick to really do anything, I turned the wheels against the slide and myself and the dude riding with me just screamed like girls and luckily for us there was a mound of snow just bit enough to stop the truck right at the edge of that ditch. I had to change my pants when I got home

Nothing on the scale of the stuff here, but my memory is of when I was a teenager, I was out camping and hiking with my Dad and his friend.
His friend was ex military, and recently ex, but never entirely clear what he did, and I never queried it. Early fifties, could stare down pretty much anything, including it turned out, weather. My Dad was the same age, competent, fairly robust, and loves doing stupid outdoor gak.
We started a hike in the Lake District, which UK folks will know as the place we store our rain and wind.

It was a bit of a gale. Most of the way up a mountain in a valley, I looked across to the opposite side, and saw a stream running backwards from the force of the wind, including a waterfall that was now going vertically into the air. I remember thinking this was weird, bur trusting my Dad and his friend.

The rain was then roughly horizontal, and I was struggling to physically step in any direction, being a mighty 5' 3" and all of 90lb. We rounded to where the source of the wind was, head on.
I distinctly remember looking down and realising my feet weren't touching anything, seeing my dad's friend mouth "oh gak", and then in simple terms, I blew off the side of a small mountain, and skidded, rolled and bounced until landing in a small river. For a brief while, I flew.

After eventually coming to a halt and finding a space shallow enough not to knock me on my ass, I sat in a hollowed bank of the river, and looked back up. Two small colourful dots were waving at me, so I waved back.

About two hours later, they reached where I'd got to, and my Dad asked if I'd damaged the camera I'd been carrying.

One of the worst storms I can remember was in the summer of 1993 during my family's vacation to Colorado. We had stopped for the night in Lawrence, Kansas, and there was a tornado. Supposedly it blew right through the campground where we were staying. All I can remember (I was 6 years old at the time) was a lot of rain, wind and so, so much lightning. Probably the closest I've ever been to a tornado, though.

I've seen some pretty nasty weather throughout my life though. I live in mid-Missouri, so we get a little bit of everything. In the summer, there are days where the temperature gets as high as 110 degrees F and plenty of humidity to make the air feel like hot soup, and in the winter it can get down to 20 below at night (although this is pretty rare), and we can get as much as 18 inches of snow in one storm (also fairly rare to get that much snow). We get plenty of big thunderstorms and the occasional tornado as well. One of the worst storms I've ever seen at home was in 2006. Golf ball sized hail everywhere. Broke my bedroom window and dented my dad's work truck and his car. I remember my dad literally shoveling the hail off of the porch and sidewalk. I had to take a piece inside and cut it open to see all the layers (that is just so cool looking!). Biggest hail I've ever seen, before or since. That summer was a great time to be in the roofing industry, as plenty of contractors from all over the state came in since there was way too much work for the local firms.

Tornadoes are a bitch. Growing up in North Louisiana and living in SE Texas, I have lived in areas that have had their fair share. However, the worst experience I have had with them was here in North Illinois. On a Saturday night, we were getting torrential rain, something I was very accustomed to from my years in Houston, TX. The wind was really howling and there was some hail hitting the siding and the deck outside. We heard the tornado sirens about the same time the rain suddenly stopped. Like, buckets of rain and then nothing.

It's true that a tornado sounds like a train. I grew up near a railroad track. I now have 2 very busy rail lines near my home. When the rain stopped and the siren wailed, we heard the sound of a train. I grabbed the dog and my wife grabbed the cat. We ran down to the basement and turned on the news.

The lights flickered on and off a few times. We heard the train wound get softer and then finally nothing. The rain had slacked off, considerably and the hail stopped. I went outside to assess the damage.

Major hail damage to the siding, but no roof damage. Some big limbs down, but the fence was fine. Lawn chairs knocked over but fine. My grill was spun around and about 10' from where it normally stays. All of my window frames (fiberglass) were ruined, but the glass was fine.

We walked around the neighborhood and realized how lucky we got. The house directly behind us had major roof damage. The house on our side of the street, 3 houses down also had damage. You could draw a line from those houses and see the path the tornado took. Trees and bushes from the woods near us were knocked down, then it hit the high school and tossed the football bleachers into the middle of the field, and some of the baseball seats ended up in someone's yard. All told, about $350k in damages to the school.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-county-news-sun/news/ct-lns-grayslake-high-tornado-st-0820-20150819-story.html

It rains quite often in England, but it's usually not very heavy. I remember a few heavy storms when I was young. One I remember in particular was when I was about 13, I'd been at my grandparents house, and my granddad had offered to drive me home because of the rain. As we drove over the railway bridge, there was a good view over the town, and in the distance I could see two huge pillars, which I can only describe as waterfalls coming out of the sky, they must have each been a mile high. I remember saying "wow, what is that?", and my granddad replying that it must be rain in the distance, but I'd never seen anything quite like it. As we drove the rain got heavier, until it was difficult to see the road, even with the wipers at full speed, and it had started to thunder. Just before my house, we had to turn and go underneath a motorway flyover. As we emerged on the other side, there was a loud bang, and it sounded like something big (like a cow) had fallen on the roof, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw what looked like white flames flash down the outside of my window. My granddad instinctively slammed on the breaks, and I remember him saying "what was that?", and I said "I think we might have just been hit by lightning". I read many years later that, apparently, the flyover gets struck by lightning quite often.

I have a few stories from growing up in South Houston, then moving out to the coast during my high school years. These are nothing unheard of to anyone who has lived down there lol.
My first run in with a tornado was when we lived in Pasadena, TX. A buddy and I were playing in a large empty field at the end of our neighborhood when we saw what appeared to be a lot of birds flying all crazy. It soon dawned on us, as the tornado came around a large tree that was blocking our view, that what we thought were birds was actually the debris around the edge of a tornado. We start running down the street towards our houses when we realize that we wouldn’t make it and the tornado was now in the field where we were just playing. We dove into the culverts where the ditch that served as drainage went under someone’s driveway and watched as the tornado lifted up into the clouds and went over where we were, not on the ground. We climbed out and saw it drop again in a different part of the neighborhood for about a minute and then dissipate. Of course we were kids so we ran to my house, where we left our bikes, and rode over to that part of the neighborhood and saw that it had demolished the one trailer-home on that block and picked up a travel trailer, placing it nicely in a tree, where it sat perched like a tree house.

My second run in with a tornado was when we lived near Angleton TX. I was sitting in my living room watching TV and noticed the light in the house from outside had turned a weird color. I walked outside and looked up into the craziest green colored sky I had ever seen. The clouds were all moving about in no particular direction and everything was just this eerie green color. I knew this usually meant tornados so I ran out to our kennels (my parents showed dogs so we had a large kennel towards the barn area of our property) and shuttered all the doors so the dogs couldn’t go outside. Speaking of the dogs, they were pretty freaked out too, they refused to go outside, which made that job much easier than normal. As I step outside the kennels and get ready to head for the horse barn I see a small tornado in the pasture about a ¼ mile away moving across, parallel to the house. I watch as it demolishes our pump house for our water, takes down a couple smaller trees and then proceeds on its’ merry way out of sight.

Same area, another tornado; I was driving down 288 towards Lake Jackson and we had been under tornado warnings all day. I come around a bend and I see traffic had slowed and there were a few cars stopped on the shoulder. I slow down and look to see what everyone else was looking at and see a fairly good size tornado tearing across a pasture, essentially chasing a herd of cattle. There was one cow who was the slow one of the bunch and it fell behind, and just like that scene in Twister, got swept up, circled the tornado a couple of times and was thrown a good 50 yards from the tornado. The tornado just kept going into a big stand of trees and eventually sucked back up into the clouds without causing any property damage, except for the cow, RIP cow. (I laughed so hard when I saw that I had to pull over)

When we lived in West Columbia TX we had a really bad flood from a tropical storm or something that caused the Brazos River to overflow. The entire town had about 2-4 feet of water in it but as it was built near the river; most of the buildings were built on elevated ground. The only way to get around town was via small boats. I took my 16 ft. John Boat into work that day (not that we were very busy). Craziest thing about floods in Texas are the damn fire ants, they ball up like little water mines just waiting for you to run into them so they can storm your leg like the beaches of Normandy…

Edit for spacing..

Posting here to remind y'all that today is the 5th anniversary of May 25 2011. Here's SPC's page on it: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/archive/event.php?date=20110525

Today is the first day of the Atlantic Hurricane Season.

This is actually my brother's story, but it is interesting.

At the time he was working as a supervising engineer somewhere near the Oklahoma/ Texas border. He was supervising the construction of oil pumping platforms. This took him about 300 miles away from his home, so he had a rental Chevy Tahoe (company provided).

This was WAY out in the boonies of Oklahoma. Other than his people there was NO ONE for dozens of miles. The roads there are strait, with few intersections, no turns, and totally featureless terrain. He stayed late one night to get things set up for the next day.

One his way back to the hotel (50 miles away) the weather got extremely rough extremely quickly. He frantically surfed the radio stations looking for any that would come in. When he finally found reception it warned of a tornado touching down in his very area.

After vacating the area he ended up getting stuck at a gas station with a dozen other cars staying off the road. The wind picked back up, and that's when the hail started. Larger than Golf ball sized hail, with high winds. The windshield started to break, so he hopped into the center of the back seat, pulled his hoody and hooded coat over his head, using his breifcase and a tarp as shields.

An hour later all the cars and the gas station had all the glass broken out of them and numerous dents.