Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 00:26:07 03/05/01
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On March 05, 2001 at 01:36:40, Lonnie Cook wrote: >How did that earthquake affect you up there? We had a 6.8 earthquake on Wednesday. It was epicentered near the state capital, which is about 50-60 miles south of where I am now, and it moved Seattle 9 millimeters to the northeast. That's the strongest quake here in 50 years, but it didn't really do anything. They are trying to figure out why, actually. It should have beat the hell out of everything around here, but given how strong it was, it didn't really shake the buildings that much. A bunch of bricks fell off of buildings downtown and smashed cars, but fortunately nobody was killed as a direct result of the quake, and injuries were mostly minor. The state capitol building was pretty severely blasted, but that was closer to the epicenter. The governor of the state was actually pretty severely affected, since his house was pretty badly trashed, as was the place he works. When the quake hit, I was sitting in my office chair, reading email. There was a bit of shaking and a lot of noise coming from outside, as well as the occasional thump and bump. I didn't panic, but I certainly wasn't ready for any of this. It occurred to me that I wanted to see what was going on outside, so I ran to the front door and stood there, looking out. What I was wanting to see, I don't know. Perhaps I was hoping to see the trees shaking over at the zoo. Maybe part of my brain wanted to yell at the idiot who was rolling a tank division up the street, which is what it sounded like. Regardless, I didn't see anything in particular except for my neighbor running out of his house, probably looking for the same tank division. At that moment I remembered that I wasn't the only one in the house, so I ran to the stairs and encountered my wife, who was already going up the stairs to collect the baby who was up there. The baby slept through the whole thing. It probably didn't seem like much to her, since she's been through worse hell in the past week, seeing as she has siblings who yell at lot when she is sleeping, not to mention that she was just born, which was probably pretty nasty from her point of view. At that moment the house stopped shaking, and I went around picking up stuff. A lot of my books had fallen off shelves, and my clock had fallen off the wall, landing behind my desk, which meant that it was about a ten-minute project trying to clear enough crap off my desk that I could get back there to get it. We were without phone service for the day, not because the lines were cut, but because a picture fell off the wall upstairs and cracked the phone jack, and it took us a while to figure out that the rest of Seattle had phone service. A bunch of people were without power, but ours didn't even flicker. Mostly the earthquake didn't affect my office much since it was already pre-disastered -- if you shake up something that's already completely random you can't do anything to it except rearrange it. The rest of my kids were at school. Apparently my youngest one cried a bit. The middle one was fine. In the older kid class there was apparently a pretty emotional discussion about natural disasters. Once they figured out that the world hadn't ended they were OK with everything though. The youngest one has been going on about the "earthquake at my school", and he hasn't really been able to understand that it had happened at home, too. As far as natural disasters go, I'd rate it about a 2 on a scale of 1-10. We had a wind storm in 1992 that was worse, that one caused the I-90 floating bridge to forget to float, that and the fact that some workmen had been dumping water in the pontoons and left doors in the sides of them open. We were very very lucky that the whole city didn't fall down. Like I said, they are still trying to figure out why it didn't fall down. We are not much on disaster-preparedness here, we have a 2-mile elevated double-decker freeway built on fill-dirt that everyone is amazed didn't pancake itself like everyone expected it to. There are no plans to reinforce it. bruce
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