WSET.com - ABC13Surviving Natural Disaster Week by Scott Wilson

It's been about a month, but people are still talking about Natural Disaster Week. And I had a unique perspective on those rare occurrences.

The week that we saw both an earthquake centered in Mineral, VA and Hurricane Irene happened to be the week that each year I go with my family to the beach in Stone Harbor, New Jersey. The week started out pretty calmly (besides the fact that it took about three hours to drive from Baltimore to the New Jersey border, which should take about 90 minutes). The weather was great. On Tuesday, I was minding my own business sitting on the deck doing a crossword puzzle when the deck started to shake. It shook for about 30 seconds. I didn't have any clue what was going on, but figured that maybe the active kids that were staying upstairs were running around again. Then a couple minutes later, I got a text message from someone in Virginia asking if there had just been an earthquake. I didn't think there was any way that what I had felt could be the same thing as an earthquake in Virginia. But sure enough, when I turned on CNN, there it was. I can't imagine how busy things were in the newsroom at the time – and I was a little glad I was on vacation.

Later in the week, I was watching the reports of Hurricane Irene coming closer to the East Coast with a detached eye. Hey, it could bring some rain to Virginia, which was needed. But things became much more immediate on Thursday. When I got back to the beach house after playing golf, I found out that the county that Stone Harbor was in had issued mandatory evacuations. Instead of being able to stay until Saturday morning like we had planned, we were being asked to leave by 9:00 a.m. on Friday. Of course, any time you hear about mandatory evacuations, you picture long lines of cars just sitting waiting to all leave at the same time. So we decided that the best plan was to pack up as soon as possible and hit the road that night. We did, getting back to my parents' house in Fairfax County around 1:00 a.m. The storm didn't turn out to be all that bad – just a lot of rain on that Saturday. But it definitely left a big mark on my vacation.

So now I have a story to tell when people ask ten years from now – Where were you when the earthquake hit?