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

[firecat]

I was in the middle lane and just felt a big jolt. I swam to the edge and held on while the shaking continued. A wave in the water traveled from the lower left to the upper right, from my vantage point, and the guy in the lane next to me was thrown out of the pool on the wave. The guy wasn't hurt, he just danced around excitedly saying "WOW! That was cool!"

The pool was associated with an Apple building (not where the Apple campus is now). I was in the pool instead of in my cube on the 7th floor because I had taken a training class of some kind that day that had let out early. The folks on the 7th floor were pretty badly shaken up; monitors were flying around and stuff. I'm glad I was in the pool instead.