During my childhood, I lived in Michigan, where we went through tornado drills at school. I remember being in the basement of my dad’s home after a tornado warning sounded throughout the area. All of us huddled in fear (at least I was). We listened to the tornado reports on a small radio.
Nothing happened to us or anyone near us.
I’m pretty sure I wrote about being in Florida, driving, when off in the distance to the left, I saw a white tornado and to the right a black tornado. Freaky. With houses in Florida, the Ft. Lauderdale area, there were no basements. No place to hide.
When living in Southern California, I missed the 6.9 magnitude earthquake in 1989; the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco. My daughter had just gotten off work when the earthquake hit at 5:04 p.m. She was six months pregnant and was in the open air parking lot and said the cars were bouncing around. I was thankful that she worked and lived in Marin County and wasn’t on the Oakland Bay Bridge – where a portion of it collapsed, killing more than two dozen people.
Earthquakes freak me out. There is nothing that’s controllable during an earthquake. I suppose it’s the same with a tornado, it’s just that I’ve never been in one. Thank goodness.
On Jan. 17, 1994, when the Northridge earthquake hit with a magnitude of 6.7, I was in Marin County visiting my daughter. Pure luck, I thought, having escaped another heavy hitting earthquake.
When earthquakes happened near me, no matter the time, I’d call my friends Keith and Candy and inevitably Keith would answer the phone with, “You’re OK, Lucy.” Once I heard his deep, reassuring voice, I was OK.
I missed the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka. Again I was visiting my daughter in California. I lived in Sri Lanka then, a block away from the beach. The sea water rushed through the street and flooded my garage, but didn’t go into the house as it was three steps higher than the garage.
The tsunami wiped out all the beach-side restaurants and shanty homes. It was a miracle that the woman who lived on the beach, who was my housekeeper, survived as did her entire family.
My friends said I was lucky to have been in the U.S. at the time of the tsunami because I was such a crazy photographer that I might have gone to the sea to photograph the receding water and the flopping fish, right before the first wave hit.
Sometime after that there was a tsunami warning around 11 p.m. My housekeeper and my photo partner, Lipton, packed the car and the dog (Toby) while I ran down the street toward the beach, banging on my neighbors’ gates, yelling, “Tsunami! Tsunami!”
There was no tsunami that night and I’m not sure what the neighbors thought of me, but I’m sure they figured it was just the strange foreign woman, who they didn’t talk to anyway.
In Sri Lanka there were also landslides of epic magnitude. Fortunately, I didn’t experience any, but I did help people who had. Plus, there were storms that seemed to hover above our house. So scary that I wore rubber flip-flops even to bed.
But I have never, never experienced fires like ones in Lake County. I’ve been evacuated twice. Once just to the Mar-Val grocery store parking lot for the afternoon and another time during the Mendocino Complex Fire. Toby, my big Rhodesian Ridgeback and I were lucky enough to stay with a friend in Clearlake for more than three weeks. Not easy staying away from home for so long. My neighbor refused to evacuate and would give us updates on the fire just over the ridge. He wasn’t popular with the police, as he was supposed to shelter in place, but we loved his updates.
A friend’s daughter’s (Stephanie Fagan’s) house was one of some 30 structures burned during the recent Boyles Fire. They lost everything. Her husband, a firefighter, was fighting the Coffee Pot Fire in Tulare County while firefighters here were trying to save his house.
I suggested they start a GoFundMe to help them get back on their feet.
I checked my GoBag(s) when I found that Stephanie had to evacuate so fast that her one child ran out of the house barefoot. My big question is, will I be able to stuff my four cats into their carriers into my VW Bug in time for any evacuation?
What’s a girl to do? Do a test evacuation run.
Lucy Llewellyn Byard is currently a columnist for the Record-Bee. To contact her, email lucywgtd@gmail.com
