Shake, shake, shake

I’ve lived through a couple of pretty minor earthquakes.

Decades ago, my husband and I were in a hotel room in San Diego when there was a small quake. We knew enough to go stand in the doorway of the interior bathroom. When the earth stood still, we emerged to find that there’d been some minor property damage, including some tram tracks that had shook loose.

I had a business trip that included a swing through LA that was scheduled for January 18, 1994. The day after the Northbridge earthquake struck. That spur of the trip canceled, I recall that it was a big PITA getting myself to San Francisco for the part of the trip that went on. Did I really have to fly to Chicago, to Phoenix, to San Francisco? I believe that was the case. Fortunately, when I got there, I found San Francisco to be quake-free.

My brother Tom and is wife live on the Pacific coast, in the state of Washington – in the very area where, if there’s a 9.0 earthquake, it’s predicted that there’ll be a tsunami, with a 60-foot tall wave that will wash over their town. They’re on a hill, and there’ll be a 15-20 minute warning, but I hope I’m not visiting the day that 60-foot wave rolls in.

With luck, I’ll be home. Here where it’s relatively safe.

Not completely safe, of course.

New England, surprisingly, has its share of earthquakes.

One year, on the evening before Thanksgiving, we were sitting there watching TV when the house began to tremble. Yep. A quake. No biggy, but when you live in a building that’s over 100 years old – one that’s built on landfill – there’s always that vague little back-of-brain worry that your world is about to collapse.

In the fall of 2012, I was at The Writers’ Room of Boston when a 4.1 on the Richter scale earthquake hit Boston. It was kind of scary. We definitely felt the tremors and saw things swaying. Everyone quickly got online and learned that there’d been a shakeup.

But I’ve never been through one of the bridge-buckling, road-breaking,house-collapsing kind of earthquake. And I hope to never have that experience, thank you. Definitely not on the bucket list.

And although we do have our shocks here on the East Coast, it’s a lot bigger worry on the West.

…the U.S. Geological Survey says there’s a 99.7 percent change of a 6.7 or higher quake hitting somewhere on the Pacific coast before someone taking out a 30-year mortgage today has paid it off. In partnership with universities in California, Oregon, and Washington, the USGS has spent 12 years working on ShakeAlert, a network of 860 seismometers that will feed an early warning system comparable to those in other tectonically challenged locales. (Source: Bloomberg)

The warning system won’t give enough of a head’s up to let you, say, figure out what you want to carry with you if you can only save a few things. But even a few seconds warning can help.

“If you know a major quake is coming, you can brace for impact,” says Bob de Groot, who’s heading ShakeAlert development at the USGS. “A lot of people won’t die needlessly.”

That’s good. If I were living in one of them there “tectonically challenged locales” I’d be more than happy to get a few seconds to grab my phone and hunker down in a doorway while waiting for the earth to move.

Shake. Shake. Shake.