quake report

[firecat]

At 8:04 PM I was sitting in an Una Mas restaurant in Redwood City with jwermont, waiting for our food.

firecat [*thinking*]: "jwermont is tapping her foot really hard."
jwermont [*thinking I'm tapping my foot*]: "Either you're very impatient for your food or we're having an earthquake."
firecat [*watching the wall ripple*]: "We're having an earthquake."
Other people in the restaurant: [*Looking up alertly like a bunch of meerkats*]

I tried to use my cell phone to send a text message so I would remember the time, but the message failed multiple times. That worried me—where I was, the quake wasn't so strong, but it lasted a long time, and I didn't know but maybe it was on the Hayward fault.

So when we got home we went to the computer and looked up the quake on usgs.gov. Fortunately it turned out not to be too serious.

Overall not nearly as exciting as the Loma Prieta quake (I was in a swimming pool in Cupertino at the time). Thank goodness.

Comments

[ona-tangent.livejournal.com]

"watching the wall ripple" may be the scariest phrase I've heard today. So...after a small but long lasting earthquake, do you order pie or do you just pay the check and go home? I think I would order pie.

[firecat]

Our food arrived and we ate it...but as we were there close to closing time we didn't annoy the staff by ordering pie afterward. :)

[genomekelly.livejournal.com]

"watching the wall ripple" may be the scariest phrase I've heard today

Say it again.

I was living in Pasadena when, just over 20 years ago, the Whittier Narrows earthquake struck. It was a Friday morning, I was asleep, and the crescendo of sound & vibration first seemed like a really big truck rolling down the street.

Then I bolted out of bed, "Oh fuck, this is an earthquake!" I shouted to nobody. I dutifully stood in a doorway for a couple of seconds, before I shouted "Oh fuck, my thesis!"

I walked to my dining room table to _manually park the heads_ on my Mac Plus external hard drive (this was October 1987, after all): I needed to safeguard my dissertation files. As I went through my tiny apartment, I noted the walls & floor & ceiling all flexing.

That evening was the start of the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur. It was the _first time_ in my entire life that I attended every last one of the holiday services.

Whittier Narrows was a Richter 5.9 with epicenter ca. 10 miles from my apartment. The aftershock sequence that weekend included a Richter 5.1, if memory serves.

It was a rather jarring sign that, perhaps, my time in California ought to draw to a close.

Seven years later when the Northridge earthquake collapsed an apartment building, I was very disturbed to discover that my old Pasadena apartment was of near-identical construction to the one that fatally failed.