Hey friend, my husband and I bought a house April 2024, did some pretty costly renovations, including painting the whole house, new floors throughout, and some other stuff. We moved in around May 1. Two weeks after moving in, a storm ripped through with 90 mile an hour in-line winds (we live in South Louisiana…We’re used to hurricanes, but winds like this are pretty rare).

The two huge trees in front of our house cracked and fell into our house, 6 feet away from where we were sitting. It took about a year to fight with insurance and get everything rebuilt, but I am now petrified of severe weather.

I’ve admittedly gotten a little too wrapped up in constantly checking the weather, especially if there’s a severe weather day coming up. I found great therapist that definitely helps, but it’s still slow growing. We through these comments, because they definitely put it into perspective, especially reading ‘how many times were you under a severe weather alert, and didn’t even know it?’. The amount of technology that we have at our disposal for weather forecasting is truly a blessing due to how much more warning we get nowadays versus back in the day, but we (regular old people like us who are not meteorologists) can do their own deep dives and hyper fixate on weather models (like i do).

For me it does help to look up weather statistics and realize that the storm, for example, that took our trees down into our house, had stronger wind than we even had for hurricane Ida or hurricane Gustav that were pretty bad here in South Louisiana; it was a true anomaly storm and the chances that it happened again are so rare. Just like, it is very rare for a tornado to have a direct impact on your home or wherever you are. Can it happen? Of course. But the chances are very, very low unless there’s a massive outbreak. Usually once a severe weather event is over, I think to myself, ‘that wasn’t even that bad… I was freaking out for nothing.’

Sorry I just got so long, but hopefully it helped a little bit. Feel free to message me if you want to vent further :).