OOC # 39
We had a decent quake hit Salt Lake City back in 2020 (just under four years ago, now). I was at the park...they were installing a new ride and I got picked to be part of the install crew for the facade (it's a kids' ride, so it wasn't a HUGE project...not like the one I was helping finish up last year...)
I heard the rumble and thought someone was driving some heavy equipment past the building I was in...sounded like a front-end loader or something like that. Stepped outside and nothing was there...poked my head back inside and noticed the brooms and rakes that were hanging on the wall were all swaying back and forth, and then I looked outside and the plants were all swaying, even though there was no wind...
All my friends that live in Salt Lake, proper, were freaking out about it...but if I hadn't had to be at the park early for that install project (it hit just after 7am), I would have slept right through it, very likely.
And thunderstorms are fairly common here, but the worst ones I've ever been through were in the Midwest, or down on the Navajo Reservation. I'd rank the Midwest higher, because the storms on the reservation, while VERY intense, were also usually fairly short. The one my friends and I drove through when we went back to Minnesota? That was hours of driving through some of the heaviest rain I've ever experienced, with lightning flashing from somewhere around us every few seconds. I told my friends at one point that if it started hailing, we had to pull over and look for a ditch, because it was so dark that we could have been driving straight into a tornado and wouldn't be able to see it...when the lightning provided enough light, the windows were so rain-soaked that you couldn't really make out much. My friend was basically just following the stripes in the middle of the road because he couldn't see far enough ahead to follow the road, itself.
After that, thunderstorms in this part of the country seem comparatively mild.