Listening to everyone around here tell their “earthquake story”, I’ll blog my boring one… (we live about an hour away from the quake’s focus)
I guess it was a little more than an hour and a half ago or so. I was sitting at work, doing my workly work things, when a low rumble came out of nowhere. What could it be? Probably the air conditioning unit going out again — we were having problems with it a couple weeks ago. Perhaps construction nearby? But it kept going and kept getting stronger. An earthquake maybe? Nah, since when have we ever gotten an earthquake around here? (Not in my lifetime!) A guy who had obviously experienced this sort of thing before started evacuating people. If it had gotten any worse, thank goodness someone there knew what to do. My plan of action was to just sit there and look around curiously. If it had gotten disastrously strong, I either would’ve managed to get out of there, or would have died from falling debris without fearing death or knowing it was coming. Anyway, it got strong enough that it was undoubtedly an earthquake, but not strong enough to cause any big apparent damage, at least where we were. It concerned me, but I can’t say it got strong enough to scare me. Nothing I saw scared me, at least, and we weren’t being jolted strong enough to cause any imbalance or anything. Some small items here and there fell over, but nothing huge, nothing like the awful videos you see from other parts of the world. But, for safety, the building was evacuated, and all public buildings I know of have been closed for the day (much to the disappointment of some).
I’ve heard stories of windows breaking, plates falling, stuff falling out of fridge doors, but no tragedies yet, and I hope I don’t hear any. At home, the situation looked the same: things fallen over here and there, off shelves, some things shifted around, cracks in the drywall that may or may not be earthquake induced. But nothing to worry about. Pic of the damage here: http://pic.twitter.com/5kQIsjX Oh, and my TV that my sister was borrowing fell off a shelf and broke, so she’ll have to pay for it…
Really, the only thing that interests me about this earthquake is that I’ve never been in one before, never really knew how it felt. But it feels just like you would imagine… the ground shakes. And, though it was not too huge of an earthquake, I have no real desire to experience one again, thank you very much. Even if it’s not life-threatening, it’s annoying.
1 Comment
S P Hannifin · August 24, 2011 at 8:01 PM
I’ve heard that evacuating a building during an earthquake is actually not the safest action to take, according to FEMA. “Many of the 120 fatalities from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake occurred when people ran outside of buildings only to be killed by falling debris from collapsing walls.” They say the safest thing to do is to duck and cover under something. So maybe that guy evacuating the building didn’t actually have much of a clue and was just scared.
Maybe it’s the power trying to come back on?