How often? Not very. Maine’s had six direct mainland hits since 1851. (For context, Florida is at 110.) But they have a return rate here of once every 20 years, according to Hayes, and Maine hasn’t had one for a while…

Last big event: Carol and Edna hit back-to-back in 1954, killed 11 people, brought 70-plus mph wind gusts.

“We’re due,” Eugene Maxim, a planning and research associate at the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said just before this hurricane season. Damage potential- to people and property – is much greater than 50 years ago. No uniform building standards, and home-buyer apathy, won’t help: “They have more interest in what’s going in the kitchen for cabinets than they have in how the house was built.”

Tornadoes

How often: About twice a year. They’re not as tall and not as wide as the twisters out West.

Last big event: One person died, two were injured and 12 houses damaged in July 1890 when a tornado touched in Winthrop. According to The Tornado Project out of Vermont, “A woman was killed by a church belfry.”

An F3 – strong enough to tear down walls, overturn trains – went unnoticed in the early 1990s up in the Allagash. “I don’t think we even discovered it until several years later when someone was doing an aerial survey,” said Jim Hayes, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Gray.

Earthquakes

How often? With indefinable regularity. Even the spate of quakes around Bar Harbor the last two weeks – a magnitude 3.4 and 2.4 on Sept. 22, a 2.5 on Sept. 28, a 3.9 on Oct. 2 and 20 “miniquakes” – are within the average, said Henry Berry, a physical geologist at the Maine Geological Survey.

Last big event: A March 1904 earthquake with a 5.1 magnitude in Washington County knocked down chimneys and was felt as far away as Montreal and Connecticut.

Maine doesn’t have active fault lines and it’s in the middle of a large tectonic plate. MGS puts the risk of a very serious, 6.0-plus event at roughly once every 330 years. “If you don’t plan to live, say, more than 200 years, maybe you wouldn’t worry about it,” Berry said. “It’s a very low probability, but it’s not a ‘no probability.'”

Wildfires

How often: Often. Maine Department of Conservation’s goal is to have no more than 1,000 wildland fires a year, spokesman Jim Crocker said. Year to date, it’s at 608. (Most are as small as a house lot.)

Last big event: In 1977, a Baxter State Park fire burned out of control for 14 days, consuming 3,600 acres. It was sparked by lightning, the same culprit behind a 1,000-acre fire near Moosehead in 2003.

Unlike in Maine, “Out West it’s very dry. The types of trees they grow there are very susceptible for quick burns,” Crocker said. Plus, here it’s usual to leave a lawn buffer between house and trees. “Out West they build right up to the forest.”

Blizzards

How often? Not as much as you’d think. Technically, there’s got to be one-quarter-mile visibility or less, falling or blowing snow and wind speeds of 35-plus mph. Maine appears to have had 11 since 1993, according to the National Climate Data Center.

Last big event: Between Feb. 6-8, 1978, parts of the state saw as much as 2 feet of snow, 70-mph wind gusts and tides up 5 to 6 feet. It’s considered the benchmark.

When blizzards strike meteorologists: Back on March 8, “We got stuck here at the office. We couldn’t even get to our cars in the parking lot,” Hayes said.