What’s the worst natural disaster you’ve ever personally experienced?

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Ever been stuck in a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood, landslide, volcanic eruption, drought or forest fire? Ever watched a tsunami approach? About 10 years ago I was on vacation with my family it the area we all grew up in for a reunion, when a small electrical storm kicked up one night. By the next morning it was apparent that lightning had hit a tree and started a small forest fire – everything smelled like a campfire. We went about our day to day business, visited with my Nana at her home and went shopping. I'll never forget how we found out it was more serious than we'd initially thought. We walked into a grocery store to get some stuff for a get-together we had planned for that evening, and people were frantically throwing jugs of water, and non-perishables into their carts and on the loudspeaker was a harried sounding employee announcing the store would be closing early due to evacuation orders. We ran into one lady, who knew my mom, that told her one route out of town was already blocked off due to the fire. It was about 10 feet from the highway and in danger of crossing, so firefighters weren’t letting people through that way. Instead they were funneling people out the other 2 ways, so to try those first. We grabbed a few things, checked out as fast as we could and drove back up to Nana’s house. As we approached the neighborhood she lived in, we looked up above the trees, and directly across the golf course she lived beside was a mountain that was almost completely on fire. It was less than 2 miles away. When we got there, she was sitting on her steps with her car already packed up, and we hurriedly grabbed a bunch of food out of the fridge and some baking she had in the freezer, put it in our van, stuck a sprinkler on her roof (one of the biggest dangers of forest fires near cities and towns is that burning ash and debris will set down on a home, setting it and nearby homes ablaze. With firefighters otherwise engaged in fighting the biggest danger, often these houses burn to the ground before help can arrive) and we headed for the closest route out of town. Once on the highway, we put another ½ a mile between us and the fire but got a better vantage point. I remember a water bomber making their drop on the fire, and the huge plume of smoke went up and Nana looked up and said, "It looks like the apocalypse". I was terrified. I was even more terrified when the firefighters stopped traffic and started re-routing us back to the other exit because the fire had proceeded too close to the highway we were on. We finally got out, got to the nearest town where more relatives lived, that could put us up (Thank God, because all the hotels were full!) and when they broadcast that residents were allowed to go back, we did to survey the damage. Nana's house was fine, but there were lots of houses that caught fire and burned to the ground. Unfortunately, the police came around just 2 short hours later to tell us we had to leave again. It sort of continued on like that for the next 2 days while they struggled to control the fire. Water bombers and helicopters were flown in from all over Western Canada. That weekend emotions and tempers ran high.. we're all very thankful to make it out unscathed, but I think we’ll all remember it. What about the rest of you?