On shaky ground

It was lunch hour during third grade, and we were eating our sack lunches in our classroom.  No idea where our teacher was -- probably having a couple of stiff drinks in the teachers' lounge. 

I was entertaining myself by choking one of my female classmates with my bare hands, when she began shaking.  And everything began shaking.  Everyone panicked, and instinctively  made a dash for the door, down the hall, down the stairs (as plaster began falling off the walls), and out of the building.

It was a 6.7 earthquake, centered about 65 miles to the north.  Damage wasn't severe in my town, but the shock was significant.  Especially the mental shock of realizing that the earth was not a firmly located ground zero against which all other altitudes could be measured.  Sometimes it was terra infirma.

It also gave me a healthy respect for the powers of the female gender.

I was in San Diego for the Fourth this week, and glancing at my phone while there, discovered that a 6.4 earthquake had occurred about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles.  We were surprised, because no one felt a thing in San Diego.  But yesterday, an even larger quake -- variously reported as 7.1 or 6.9 -- occurred, centered at the same location. 

I had departed by plane a few hours before the second quake struck, and friends sent me video clips from a San Diego restaurant where'd they'd been having dinner, showing a massive chandelier swaying from the ceiling, with excited and nervous chatter among restaurant guests in the background.

Headlines kept using the term "The Big One," which is really kind of ridiculous.  The term, both in California and in the Puget Sound region, should be reserved for the quake that hasn't yet occurred but is due to strike at any moment -- a 9.0 or higher quake, which by definition will be at least a hundred times more powerful than a 7.0 shaker.

If such a "Big One" occurs in the Northwest, federal officials say they have written off most of Washington west of I-5.  My house is ten blocks or so east of I-5.  Which doesn't reassure me.  I've had the house bolted to its foundation, which is an excellent way of avoiding serious damage during, say, an 8.0 or less earthquake.  I doubt if my house will survive a Big One.

I question whether I myself would survive.  I've put aside minimal emergency supplies of food and water -- enough for a few days.  But I understand it might be weeks before emergency supplies could be rushed to everyone who needed them, because of the total wipeout of the infrastructure.  And we haven't even talked yet about the inevitable tsunami.

Scientists estimate the chances of a Big One affecting Seattle within the next fifty years to be one out of three.  The prognosis for a quick recovery is not good:

Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

--Kathryn Schulz  "The Really Big One"  (New Yorker, 2015)

Maybe I should move some place safe from earthquakes, like Ohio.

Oh, wait ….

Third grade sounds pretty good in retrospect.