5 Times People Looked Disasters In The Face ... And Had Their Big Day Anyway
by Pauli Poisuo
There are tons of variables that can go wrong during your Big Day, whether it's a graduation, prom or your ridiculously expensive wedding. Sometimes, this doesn't just include run-of-the-mill catastrophes like Uncle Jeff turning up stone drunk and pantsless. If you're really unlucky, you might face an actual natural disaster.
When that happens, any normal person would start calling people to tell them that the event was canceled. But if you're like these people, you look nature's worst-case scenarios squarely in the eye, and tell them to suck it.
A Burning Wedding Venue Turns Into Kickass Wedding Pictures
In 2011, Mike and Nancy Rogers were scheduled to get married at the picturesque White Point Resort in Nova Scotia. The resort then proceeded to burn down at the last minute, because as it says in the Bible, God hates resort weddings in Nova Scotia.
We're absolutely not kidding when we say "last minute," either -- Nancy was literally just putting on her wedding dress when someone popped by with, "Uh, about that venue ..." Meanwhile, Michael learned the news from his parents, who had just learned it from an aunt, because at family gatherings, every single piece of juicy gossip always comes from an aunt.
Having learned that their meticulously planned dream wedding was being engulfed in an inferno that ultimately took the fire brigade six hours to put down, Nancy and Mike had a decision to make: Would they cancel the wedding and find another venue that isn't actively swallowed in all-consuming flame? Or would they adapt, improvise and get married like total bosses?
CTV News
To quote Nancy: "We still wanted to get married. If we had to get married on the side of the road, we were getting married on the side of the road. We were getting married. That was all there was to it." With that kind of determination, the universe had no choice but to comply. The resort workers quickly MacGyvered another venue that could house the 45 guests, the wedding took place as planned … and the roaring flames that were so hell bent on ruining the day were relegated to an improvised background for some of the most metal wedding photos in existence.
A Filipino School's Graduation Flood
Look at this little badass. LOOK AT HIM!
ABS-CBN
His town has turned into a city-wide wading pool, but he doesn't give a crap about water. He's too busy strutting in his best outfit to even passingly acknowledge the fact that his entire neighborhood is flooded. Nature's folly be damned, dude's got places to be. Namely, his graduation ceremony. A ceremony, in fact, where every single kid is every bit as cool as this one. Here they are, graduating in the middle of a flood, their neatly arranged rows casually ignoring nature like a living version of the middle finger:
ABS-CBN
Suck it, flood! These guys are graduating, whether your calf-deep water reserves like it or not.
These are the students of Balas Elementary School in Lamitan City, Philippines. Heavy downpours flooded the area just before graduation, and the school didn't have time to book a venue to replace their multipurpose hall that nature had just multi-purposed for water polo. So everyone just sort of shrugged and kicked off their shoes, and the ceremony was held anyway. Sure, some parents complained, but we like to think that the kids just glared at them with the steeliest look this side of a Terminator movie until the parents in question shut up and let them go about their day.
Hurricane Harvey Wrecks A Couple’s Wedding ... They Embrace The Aftermath
Shellie Schoellkopf and Robert Callaway had their whole wedding reception figured out. They had booked the venue, planned the entertainment, remembered to invite all the 150 guests, the whole nine yards. There was just one minor bump on their road to marital bliss: Hurricane freakin' Harvey.
It takes a special kind of bad luck to have the worst storm to raze Texas in a decade hit the streets just before your wedding. It takes even worse luck for it to utterly destroy your reception venue. Both of these things happened to Schoellkopf and Callaway. Still, what they lacked in luck, they more than made up in pure tenacity.
ABC News
On top of all that, a good chunk of their guest list was now in deep, Harvey-related trouble, so the couple sprang to action. They ditched complicated wedding plans and opened their home to relatives whose own homes had been destroyed. They helped people rebuild. And when they had a moment, they got married low-key without a reception.
Finally, as a neat "See how little you've done to faze us, hurricane?" middle finger, they donated their entire $5,000 wedding reception fund to disaster-affected people. Then, they had their wedding photos taken in the middle of Harvey’s debris.
ABC News
Teens Take Prom Pictures With A Tornado
In May of 2016, several tornadoes tore through the Eastern Plains, injuring five and causing significant property damage over a single weekend. Said weekend also happened to be prom weekend. If you're not from Tornado Alley, it's easy to expect that this is a total recipe for disaster. Clearly, prom would have to be canceled or every tornado would look like a Sharknado ... if the sharks were replaced with tipsy teens in ill-fitting formals.
If you are from Tornado Alley, and thus more familiar with them than the average Joe, you can probably guess how things actually went.
The Denver Channel
A couple on their way to the prom of Wray High School in Colorado spotted one of the murder funnels, and did exactly what any teens who find themselves in badass company do: take selfies. While they were there, they took their prom pictures, too.
The Denver Channel
To be fair, they weren't just randomly posing against the backdrop of a natural phenomenon that could have sucked them up in the sky at any moment. The funnel was in the process of touching down, and the group made sure that they were in no immediate danger before taking the shots. To be even fairer, Wray High School did ultimately recognize the fact that several concentrations of whirring death wind were running rampant in the area, so they did end up pushing back the prom for safety reasons.
For a full 45 minutes.
To make sure that people arrived safely.
Yes, Even Volcanoes
Out of all possible natural disasters that could wreck your wedding day, volcanoes are among the worst. Earthquakes? Volcanoes laugh at those as they hurl molten rock at your face while shaking the ground. Tsunamis? These bad boys cause tsunamis. A mountain that spews various heat-related terrors at you can disrupt the world's air travel, and is extremely proficient at flash-frying ancient Roman cities. A volcano is a veritable buffet of mayhem that definitely has no problems ruining a measly wedding, is what we're saying.
That is, unless said fiery mountain is situated in the Philippines, where newlyweds just don't give a damn.
SFGate
Mt. Doom here is actually a significantly less awesomely named Mount Mayon, in the northeastern Philippines. To say that it erupted in early 2018 is to miss a perfect chance to use the word “exploded,” which is why the news media actually used the latter term. This is probably the first time you've heard about it because some politician or another tweeted something weird at the time, but we’re talking about a pretty serious erupt- sorry, explosion, here. We're talking about a massive tectonic diarrhea burst that shot lava 2,297 feet into the sky, followed by a 1.9 mile ash plume and five further eruptions, the full process taking a good two weeks. We're talking 56,000 evacuated people, entire villages falling into darkness, and streams of lava cascading everywhere.
However, we're decidedly not talking about canceled weddings. On the contrary, this geographical instrument of mayhem didn’t budge Arlo Gerald de la Cruz and Maria Hussa Maica Nicerio in the slightest. They just had to find a little higher ground for their wedding pictures. So they could fit in the volcano.
SFGate
If there's a Rogue Hall Of Fame (and we're sure there will be someday), we nominate every single person in this article as inductees.
