Write a narrative on the topic, The day you faced a natural disaster or helped other people who had such an experience
Answers
The only classical natural disaster I've been in is a 5.x earthquake when I was 6. Home alone, I had no idea what to do or what earthquakes are, so I figured it was something I did and that if anything fell and broke, I'd get the blame. So I gathered all my stuffed animals and put them under the bar with all the alcohol bottles, wherever there was a table with a vase, and wherever there were framed photos. As soon as I finished, the earthquake stopped, so I quickly gathered them up before my mother came back home so she'd think nothing happened.
For something far more dangerous, I did nearly die in an unseasonable storm. It doesn't count as a natural disaster, but close enough. We were practicing how to make geological maps in the Austrian Alps. Groups of two, each group gets a region. We got lucky, our region was very large but mostly flat with one small mountain and a large, much more complex one. We decided to do that one in one go, since my partner has vertigo and can't stand mountain climbing. So on the scheduled day, we got up to half the mountain. Most of the mountain was made up of a type of marl which is slippery even when dry, so it was fairly treacherous, especially with the incompetent with me.
But then a storm rolled in completely unexpectedly. Torrential rain with hail. We were in the middle of the forest, spidering our way up to the top of the mountain on a ~80° slope. I used the marl outcrops as footholds when there was no tree, but I had no idea that when they got wet, they have as much grip as Vaseline. So I slipped and rolled down several tens of meters and crashed belly-first into a tree. When I recovered from the blow, I noticed blood on my hand and noticed that the compass around my neck was gone. It turns out that I had just missed getting my jugular punctured by some sharp rock on the way down, and my neck was bleeding out. Luckily the first aid kit was still there, as well as the Jägermeister. I had cracked a couple of ribs and sprained my wrist, so there was no going up or down the mountain. We ended up tying ourselves to each other with a rope. My partner was overweight, I was underweight, so I had my partner crawl his way to the regular path while I shouted words of psychological encouragement to make him get over his fear and vertigo. We then walked down Mount Doom, and went back to our youth hostel. Luckily, we had gone far enough up the mountain that we discovered all the parts to it, so no need to go there anymore.