500,000 evacuated due to typhoon
Where do they put them all? Where do you put half a million evacuees?
I’ve e-mailed my relatives in Osaka, but I haven’t heard anything back from them. That’s not really surprising, since it’s the middle of the night for them, and they’re probably okay, since they’re not in the harbour area, but I worry some.
I just heard back from the relatives. They’re all okay. They had a lot of wind and rain, but didn’t suffer nearly as much damage as Kyoto did. whew
It makes for a pretty miserable evacuation. I was part of the ~2.5M people that evacuated Houston for Hurricane Rita, and I don’t ever want to relive the experience. It was 23 hours in the car to go about 220 miles, and almost every second was spent in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Just awful.
Glad your relatives are okay. Hurricanes—and their typhoon twin siblings—are awful.
Glad to hear everyone is ok.
At least here in Indiana we don’t have to sit and wonder if something will hit us. The tornadoes usually tear through everything too quick to wonder about much at all.
Tornadoes are about the only natural phenomenon that really worries me based on where I live. Flood? We’re on a tall hill. Blizzard? Meh. Earthquake? Any significant seismic event here would have to open a hole in the earth’s crust big enough to swallow the county, as we’re nowhere near any significant fault lines.
I know the topography doesn’t support frequent or powerful twisters here, but they do happen. And I still haven’t gotten off my ass and figured out what directions NW and SE are out my front door for a last-ditch evacuation.
We live in a pretty darn good area here in W WA. A seismic wave MIGHT take us out, but we’re not likely to get caught in a coastal wave or a volcano eruption. However, whenever “The Big One” hits, we’re probably toast.
I can’t imagine the hell people in disaster-prone areas go through. I lived right smack in the middle of tornado alley in college, but we never got hit – much. Everywhere around us did, and they had record touchdowns those years, but we stayed relatively safe. I think we had a wind sheer that took out a window on a building far out on the edge of campus.
Yeah, we’re good for anything short of Mount Rainier going off–and that will utterly destroy WA as a populated entity if it’s significant at all.
As with all things ultimately out of your control, you just try not to think about it. Though, yeah, the two hurricane evacuations we’ve been through in the past 10 years were both pretty damn unpleasant. It’s just surreal to think of all the fixtures of everyday life—your home, the stores you shop in, the places you go all the time—being destroyed.
/me prays for decade of hurricane-free safety please.
Here it’s earthquakes and wildfires. The former don’t happen very often (at least ones big enough to cause damage) and with the latter, CalFire is pretty good about jumping on it ASAP. But as Lee says, you just try not to think about it too much.