Shakety Shake

Yep, that was a big earthquake. A whopping 5.4 on the old Richter scale, although that's still not the biggest one I've ever been through. (That, according to Mom, would be an Alaska quake of 5.6 when I was but a wee baby boy, and I don't remember it at all.)

I was in a Lightwheel meeting with Marc and Buffie, and I'm sure we all went through the same set of thoughts at the same time: is that just a vibration of the building, or is that--?; whoa, yeah, that's a--!; um, this is a lot stronger than the ones before...; should I be getting under a doorway?; no, nothing's falling off any shelves, I should be okay; man, this thing's going on for forever....

It only lasted for about thirty seconds, actually, though of course it felt as though it took a whole lot longer than that. And there seemed to be a lot going on during that time--a little bit of rolling from side to side, a little bit of bumping up and down, plus of course a whole lot of just general vibration. As the above-linked USGS page states in its summary, none of this is a surprise: this particular quake had characteristics of both kinds of major faults: a strike-slip fault that would produce a sudden jump, and a "reverse fault" that moves from here to there.

And yet as strong as this one felt (Buffie reached out, startled, and grabbed both our arms), nothing fell off any shelves, I saw no damage at all when I got home, and news reports tell me there were no injuries and no real damage to speak of, citywide. Which is both reassuring and worrying at the same time.

Reassuring because the local construction standards seem to have held up very well indeed during what was, from my limited experience, a hell of an event. But worrying because the official agencies have all dubbed this a "moderate" quake, and I can't help thinking--if that was moderate, jeez, do I even want to know what a strong quake is like?

Astonishingly, within five minutes of the earthquake we could find information about it on the USGS's website (which I have bookmarked because, you know, I live here). The local news had gone all-earthquake instantly, but since there really wasn't anything to report yet, it was just more of the usual saturation-news blather. So we three either called or e-mailed our families to let them know not to worry, then got back to work.

Still. Damn, that was something...