Earthquake!

I'm in Seattle, and just before 11:00 am today, when I was getting ready for my team meeting (and wondering if we'd end up having it at a restaurant, which is always good), we had an earthquake. It was a pretty big one, too: a 6.8 centered about 20 miles away. By midafternoon, the governor of Washington had declared a state of emergency and President Bush had talked about using emergency funds to help out. It's all quite exciting.

When the quake (which, if you're a headline writer, can also be called a "tremor", "shake", or "temblor") hit, I felt obliged to wander around reassuring people, since I was raised in Southern California where these things happen fairly frequently. It was kind of hard to be a figure of calm and reassurance, since the ceiling panels were falling down around me and I later found out that on the second floor, computers were falling off desks and a few windows got shattered. But I still got to say thing like "In the doorway, eh? Good call."

After the initial shaking and the light (but persistent) immediate aftershocks, everyone was herded out into the parking lot while the safety team checked out the building. After a lot of milling about (in which all the ex-Californians played the classic game of "guess the Intensity," and I was way off with my guess of "4.0"), they eventually told us to go home.

There was more milling about, of course, because it's hard to end a workday two hours in. Also because the roads were instantly jammed with other people trying to get home through roads clogged with accidents and unworking traffic lights. Um, not that the traffic lights were actually down in the street, but they weren't working, which slowed things down. Eventually, everyone was forced to admit that no more work was going to get done, and everyone dispersed, although some people had gone home and come back with tales of woe involving destroyed stereos and collapsed televisions.

On the ride home (which is four miles and took me about 25 minutes), my adrenaline wore off and I started wondering if my apartment was okay. I've got thirteen bookcases and a really unstable cd-storage system, so it didn't seem at all out of the range of possibility for me to get home and find that heavy objects had crushed all my computer and television stuff.

Even though I was edgy, I still made a point of being a generous driver, allowing people to go in front of me repeatedly, on the theory that everyone on the road was feeling at least as uneasy as I was. When I finally got home, I was pleased to find that only two of my bookcases had fallen over, and they were the ones with books I intend to get rid of. Conveniently, I put up my shelves so they're leaning backwards against walls whenever possible - a habit I picked up in the aforementioned Southern California Earthquake Zone. I no longer go to the extent of putting shims under the front corners to force it farther back, but it still seems to be working.

Also luckily for me, all my bookcases are made of Scandinavian Pressboard, so nothing got hurt, as far as I can tell. I've got cds all over the floor now, but that's nothing new.

I don't have any outages, either. I've got cable, and Internet, and phone, and electricity (and how pathetic is it that I list them in that order?), so basically this all works out to me having the afternoon off. And the next day off as well while they fix the building.

Of course, this is still the biggest earthquake in western Washington in fifty years, and CNN claims that 17,000 people are "without power". So it's clearly something of an incident, although so far it wouldn't make much of a disaster movie. Except for the poor people stuck on the bay.

You see, they shut down the ferry ports. And there were a couple of ferries in operation at the time. So as far as I know, they're still out there, deciding who to eat and who to just throw overboard. If that's not material for a disaster movie, it's at least a disaster miniseries. Terror on the Bay, they'd call it.

(Hey - I distinguished between "incident" and "disaster" there, and then I saw a much more comprehensive breakdown of the stratification of that sort of thing at squishy. I am stalwartly resisting the urge to reassess the situation in the light of Pamie's classifications, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go over there and read what she says)

As acts of God go, the impact on me was pretty minimal. I didn't even get the traditional Call From a Relative in Hysterics. My mother heard "earthquake" and shrugged. Big deal, she felt, those happen all the time. Even a plague of frogs would have made a bigger dent on my life. Not that I'm taunting God, daring him to come up with something bigger.

It surprises me that earthquakes catch people so off-guard up here (in Seattle. Pay attention). Mount Rainier is a volcano, and that makes Seattle part of the mighty Ring of Fire, right? Famed in Discovery Channel specials, right? So quakes (or, if you insist, temblors) are going to happen occasionally. And if you listen to seismologists, it's going to happen over and over again. There's already articles being posted saying the "Big One" is coming. Those articles seem like scare tactics to me, since if you read far enough, it says that seismologists "estimate that such a quake could occur every 1,000 years or so." Great. So I'll be sure and watch for that "Big One", which may or may not happen in the next THOUSAND YEARS. Good job, guys. Here's another government grant.

Seismology in general just seems like an inexact science to me. What's the use of telling me "Subduction quakes are thought to happen every 300 to 800 years"? You're already using "thought to happen" to cover yourself in case your prediction is wrong, so maybe you could narrow it down a little more than a range of five hundred years? Because even if you're right, I don't quite see what I'm supposed to do with the information. Except maybe be secure in the knowledge that we probably won't have another subduction quake until 2300.

I know I'll sleep better knowing that.