Ash Wednesday, 2001
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Perhaps you've heard about the great Seattle earthquake on Ash Wednesday. I survived it, as did most everyone else. Here's my report... There was a BOOM sound, and then the building started shaking. I wasn't going to fool around. I thought that I was going to hurt the guy at the desk behind mine when my chair went whipping out. We'd had a little earthquake that I felt at work a few months ago, and even then I was considering a quick dive under the desk. This time there was no hesitation whatsoever. It was the funnest scared that I've been in a long time, kind of like the ultimate roller coaster. The most surreal moment was after the power in the entire building winked out all at once, and this little desk toy that I've got fell to the floor. It's a clear spherical ball with another ball inside it, painted to look like an eye, and the eye always points up. And it rolls pretty good too. I was under my desk with one leg poised up in the air waiting to catch my desk as it fell on me, watching my little eye ball desk toy roll back and forth on the carpet. Too weird. When the shaking stopped, I stood up and hit up Cindy on the speed dial. "You OK?" "Yep". "I'm on my way". Somebody asked, "well, what do we do now?" To which I replied: "I'm getting the hell out of here!" My lead, Mangala, said, "No wait!" I guess she was worried about aftershocks. Personally, so was I. That's why I wanted to get out while the building wasn't shaking. The rest of the building had the same idea. We were shuffling down the stairwell, when I came across this one sad young lady. She was obviously shaken up (pun intended) by the events, and had been coaxed into the stairs. She was so dazed that she just sort of stood on the landing, looking about, looking at all of the people who were also trying to get out, but now hampered by her mere stationary presence on the landing. I was standing right behind her, so in my best senatorial voice (and aided by the acoustics in the stairwell), I said , "Don't Dawdle". That jarred her just enough to get her moving... So we gathered in the parking lot at our designated assembly point while the safety types got a headcount. Everybody had their story to tell. It was actually quite the traumatic experience, and everybody wanted to tell of theirs. The corollary of that is that nobody wants to hear your story, but that's just human nature. So we stood around outside, me without even a book. I told Mangala that I needed to go, and she told me that I couldn't go yet. That lasted about 5 more minutes. I went up to her and said that I'm taking sick leave. I figured that me digging my wife out of her collapsed building was a reasonable use of my sick leave! So I got to the garage (why do I park in the basement?) and blazed over to where Cindy works. That was the only moment of panic I had, as I was driving over to see her. I don't know if it was the excitement or the fact that it could have been so much worse. (Mangala later related that when she decided that it was time for her to leave, she just left, only later remembering that she had told me that I couldn't go myself. I suppose that she expected me to still be there waiting in the parking lot until night fell, but I was already gone.) When I got there, Cindy was on the phone. I just stood behind her with my arm around her. People were calling to see how their stuff in the antique mall had survived and how everybody was doing. Cindy had one customer in the mall during the shake who just stood there. Cindy had to grab this person's hand and take them outside, where they proceeded to sit on the curb. In retrospect, this wasn't such a good idea. Downtown Renton is over a hundred years old, and two of the buildings in Cindy's block had part of their brick facade collapse. Somebody even got hit by the falling bricks, but apparently wasn't hurt enough to receive attention. One of those buildings and another building across the street are condemned, and will probably be torn down. One of the other dealers in Cindy's mall came in and was lamenting the state of the place, and her husband came in later too. After some small talk, he looked at my jacket, the one with the KOMO (the local ABC network affiliate) logo embroidered on it, and asked me if I worked there. I told him no, I worked at Boeing, and that if I worked for KOMO, I'd probably be out reporting on the news! Sure enough, the television news held onto this story like a rat held by a bulldog's jaws for the rest of that day and most of the next couple. I helped pick up some of the broken glass from the antique mall. Nobody got hurt, but there was a lot of broken stuff on the floor. We later heard about an antique mall in Issaquah where they were cleaning up the broken stuff off of the floor with snow shovels. Nothing like that here. After a while, Cindy and I agreed that we needed to find out the status of the house damage, and that I should go home. Power was out were I was working and at some of the intersections on the way home, but not where Cindy was. I took an alternate route home, and the power was on and all the stoplights worked just fine, so I got home with no problems. The cats, however, were severely wigged out. They'd stand at the top of the stairs and look around corners, just waiting for weird stuff to happen again. They were disconsolate for several hours. For the longest time, it seemed like we had no damage and nothing broken. Some stuff had fallen off of shelves and been shuffled around, but we thought that we got by unscathed. However, just last night Cindy showed me a bowl that had something fall onto it that chipped it in several places. It could have been so much worse that I'm more than willing to sacrifice this ceramic nick nack to the earthquake gods. Cindy's mother and her older sister came home soon after that, and we sat and watched the news reports from the region. The initial numbers seemed quite low. The first report that I remember hearing was that the quake was a magnitude 6.2. This seemed a little low to me. Later reports stated a 7.0. Now that's more like what I felt! The final number was a 6.8, with the epicenter located 33 miles under the surface near the state capital. Olympia got hit kind of hard, with the old buildings and marble structures and all. The legislature was in session, and now, with the capital buildings unsafe, has no place to meet. It's said that no man's finances are safe when the legislature is in session, but with the tax cutting initiatives that have passed recently, the important issues that were going to be difficult to address are going to be even harder to deal with now, as that will require ever so much more money than the state. Damn Tim Eyman... We really got off easy. In 1994, my parents were in Northridge for that earthquake, and they were in Portland for this one. Numerically, our quake was stronger, a 6.8 instead of a 6.7. (Due to the logarithmic nature of earthquake measurements, these numbers don't seem that different, but they really are.) But because our quake was located so far below the surface, and not really near a major urban center, there wasn't the tremendous loss of life and property that the Northridge quake inflicted. I hear that Olympia was mad that Seattle got all of the attention. Trust me: this is not the kind of attention that anybody wants. And any event like this is going to be associated with the nearest / largest population center. If the quake had been centered a few dozen miles south, we'd all be talking about the great Portland quake. So life goes on. I certainly enjoyed the time off from work. There are now curious cracks in the stairwell at work. Any little vibration in the building gets people's eyes to darting about, looking for a place to duck and cover. And of course, our sense of security will be sorely tried for weeks to come, until we grow complacent. Then we'll really be sucker punched. I can hardly wait… p.s. My father related his earthquake experience to me, and reminded me of a story that I'd told him long ago, about an experience that I had learning to drive a jeep in that military employment situation of so long ago. We were given the jeeps to drive around a driving area that had been set up to train and test drivers of 2-1/2 ton trucks, vehicles obviously much larger than the military jeeps. Being new to these things, I hit this one berm a little fast, and recognizing such, but too late, I would up hitting the brakes in mid-air. This made landing all that much more exciting. What I told my father was: "When you are airborne in a Jeep, the brakes are of no use". A wonderful feeling of helplessness and terror, mixed with a bit of whimsy... And check out this link: the Rattle in Seattle - Earthquake art. It seems that a 2 foot sand pendulum located on the Olympic Peninsula left a tracing of the earth's motion. Very cool... |
This page is authored and maintained by Rich Webb.You can send E-mail to me by following this link to the contact page. And feel free to contact me if you have any comments, criticisms, or suggestions. I remain, however, perfectly capable of ignoring your useless opinion...
This document was last modified on March 9, 2001, and has been viewed countless times.