Great question! The very earliest story I can vaguely summon up at the moment was about a hurricane devastating the city of La Paz in Baja California Sur, from Mexican news on television. To pin down any details, I had to look it up, and came up with Hurricane Liza in 1976.

There was an image that got seared into my brain at the time, but it was probably my very young mind playing tricks on me, watching this report on one of those old, old, OLD small and blurry black-and-white televisions: the image of a dead baby lying face down among the rubble.