We just had an earthquake here, or near here. A few people called so I just want to post that I'm okay. :)
Actually, I was in a restaurant drinking coffee and talking to a friend in Florida when it hit. I told her all about it, she asked how bad was it and I went into a spiel I made up on the spot.
I said something like this:
A 3.0 is a CalPoly 'cause you have to be in the room with a seismograph to notice it. A 3.5 is a Dish Rattler and a 4.0 is a Dog Barker because the dog barks like she does when the garbage truck goes by or a mouse farts behind the baseboard. Cats will hide in the closet and demand that Something Be Done; natural political action committees, most cats.
A 4.5 is a Car Alarm for obvious reasons, though you have to be close by for it to trigger. They sell a gadget to hang on your wall that works just like a car alarm; it scares hell out of you for no reason at the oddest times. And a 5.0 is a Hug-a-Tourist. That's when a perfect stranger in the mall grabs you and hangs on for dear life and you know they're from out of town.
A 5.5 is a Ceiling Check, all the natives and people who've been here for twenty years or more will look up then at the nearest door, just to make sure they know where it is. A 6.0 is a Kneehole, you get down on the floor and scoot under your desk and you pull your idiot friend from Iowa who's still looking at the ceiling under with you. A 6.5 is a T-Shirt Slogan, you can buy one that says, "I survived the such-and-such earthquake" afterwards.
A 7.0 is a Wake-Up-The-Governor to call the National Guard; they may need to go dig some unlucky people out from under collapsed buildings and freeways. A 7.5 is what Californians call a Real Earthquake and of course, an 8.0 is The Big One. The Big One is like Santa Claus, you have the milk and cookies all ready and he never shows up.
So my friend asked me how big was it and was it close? And I said it was about a 5.5, sixty or seventy miles away. Probably east or west of me, I thought, but I didn't say that because she might not have believed me. :) She turned on the TV and found out I was pretty close, they first said a 5.8 in downtown Los Angeles which is 75 miles due west of where I was sitting on the I-10. Later they downgraded to a 5.4.
How did you do that? she asked.
Besides watching everyone in the restaurant look at the door but no one ducked under a table, I counted seismologists, I said. When you first feel the movement, start counting seismologists, (or chimpanzees), when the boom hits that's how far away it is in miles. Then the ground noise begins (a growling sound peculiar to earthquakes and asteroid-size bulldogs), and continues. Keep counting and when the growl dies away, divide by 10, and that's how big the quake is. You can tell direction, sort of, because the first shaking is a circular up-and-down-and-side-to-side perpendicular to a line from the center of the quake to you. The shaking at the peak is back-and-forth between you and the epicenter but it can be hard to tell if you're in a building. That gives you two directions for the quake, 180 degrees apart, like locating a radio signal with a loop antenna. Even standing up outside, you can be thirty degrees off, though. The shaking can go on for a long time after the boom, BTW.
How far away can an earthquake be felt? No one asked, but there's a good rule of thumb for that, too. Take the first number of the magnitude, x, and divide by two, round up, that's n. Now multiply x by the n numbers below it, starting at x-1 down to x-n. So The Big One will be felt 8x7x6x5x4x3 miles away. Basically, all over the earth, more than twenty thousand miles. The quake sound will meet itself coming back from the Indian Ocean, that's why it's called The Big One. A 7.0 in California will rattle dishes in Halifax, though you might not notice since at that distance it will sound like a very long train on the other side of town. A 6.0 in San Diego just misses being noticed in Las Vegas. And a 5.0 in Palm Springs makes the cocktail ice in Santa Barbara clink against the glass.
She asked me how I knew this stuff, did Californians take classes in it. I said, well, they do mention some of this in school but I've lived here 55 years, I figured out the number stuff myself from experience. :)
So, I'm okay. Now we wait to found out if there's going to be aftershocks, the usual situation, or if that was a pre-shock to a bigger quake.
Hugs,
Erin
Comments
Shake, rattle, and roll
Erin,
Where were you with all this vital information just a few weeks ago when I posted my latest DCHF part that had a scene with an earthquake in it??? I could have used all this wonderful information then. Talk about secrecy....... ;)
All joking aside, I'm glad you're fine. I been through one quake myself back in the late 80's. Just one reason that for what I say about the Philippines, "I love this country, but would never want to live my entire life here." Typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes, corrupt politicians, and jeepny drivers are just too much for me. I love my wife though.
Cheers,
Danielle
"Did you know when Ferdinand Marcos, he had AIDS? AIDS- Acquired income deposited Switzerland."
Daniel, author of maid, whore, bimbo, and sissy free TG fiction since 2000
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.- Oscar Levant
Quakes
I lived in L.A. for 6 years. it took me 2 years to figure out how large an earthquake was, by how it felt.
I was there for the NorthRidge quake. It was the only one that had me slightly scared. it was as you would say, a T-Shirt slogan, bordering on Call the Govenor. It was almost 3:00am. I had just gotten out of the shower when it hit. I almost lost my balance and had to hang on to my stereo to keep it from rattling its self off the shelf.
Shortly after I moved to Seattle we had a 4.2 quake. I was in a restaraunt when it hit. People in the N.W. don't know what it is like and began to freak a bit. 2 years later I was in one that was Different from all of the others I had ever felt. it was a LOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG rolling quake. the first 20 seconds of it, I was laughing as everyone dove under their desks. When it didn't stop, I finally, joined them, but still not as frightened as they were. It did a LOT of damage for being a small quake. Mainly because the buildings that were damaged were not up to earthquake code.
oh well. Now I have to deal with ever gray skies and rain that falls 300 days a year. I'm beginning to miss earth quakes.
A.A.
Don't round down
Earthquakes always round up. The Northridge and Sylmar quakes (I was nearby for both) were definite calls to the National Guard.
A friend and I were driving down 101 during the Sylmar quake. We didn't feel a thing, you usually don't in a car unless the road opens up or a bridge falls on you. We did see some of the damage but we thought it was just some weird construction since we didn't have a radio in the 1964 Beetle Steve drove. We didn't find out about the quake until we got to San Diego.
The Northridge quake was the first time I thought of counting during a quake. I lived in Huntington Beach at the time and I counted forty seconds between tremor and boom and a total growling sound of about 75 seconds. Pretty close, it was a little farther away than that. Jeanne asked where it might have been and I said either the San Fernando Valley or Where's Your Surfboard? Luckily it wasn't out in the ocean where it might have triggered a tsunami, besides, we lived four miles inland. We had to wear gloves to handle the cats all that day, though.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I think . . .
I'll stick with tornados. :-)
KJT
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
I think ...
... I'm happy here in the UK where even a tiny earthquake (we had one a couple of months ago just as we were going to bed and it rattled the wardrobe a bit) makes the news. We have boring, miserable, drizzly, damp, fairly windy weather which we never stop talking about but nothing too dramatic - mostly. Perhaps it's for the best. For a change, we've had temperatures in the high 20s this week and a strange bright object in the sky and light winds ... but it looks like rain again tomorrow :)
Glad you weren't buried, Erin. What would we do without BCTS?
btw why would a 7.0 in California affect Halifax all the way across the Atlantic and not (say) Birmingham or London or (nearer to home) Nottingham? ;)
Geoff
It's What You Grow Up With
I lived in California for my first 40 years. Quakes don't really bother me. The lack of warning reduces the overall stress. They just happen (only getting scary if they last a long time or are really big). With the midwest severe weather, you've got all the anticipation (weather people talking about it days ahead, building up to the actual day (the TV weather people actually hype the risk to build ratings), live (on TV) tracking when there is an event, watching the radar wondering if it's your turn to get clobbered or not. I've been in the mid-west for 19 years, and it still scares the bejesus out of me.
Part of the fun!
I have probably 50 or 60 weather sites bookmarked on my computer, including a paid premium Nexrad radar service that I piggyback on using the TV station's unlimited access account. My brother is a storm chaser for the station and I've gone out with him several times. Springtime severe weather is like going to a carnival, half the fun is the anticipation! You can hide, or you can run. Running (chasing) is way more fun! :-)
"I've got rotation!"
PS: You can always tell who is native and who isn't when the sirens blow. The newbies are yelling about "Where's the shelter?" (we call them 'fraidy holes'), while the locals are all outside looking around and asking "Anybody see it yet?"!
;-)
KJT
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
We have our share of earthquakes in the Midwest
Im the Milwaukee area we've had several earthquakes in the 4 to 5 range in my lifetime, you only feel them if you are in the right spot and height of building. All were likely post ice age quakes as the crust is pushed back up out of the mantle with all that weight gone.
We get tornadoes, a few dozen a year and a rare few -- three in recorded history -- were F5. We get a fair amount of snow and cold but nothing big except when we were under hundreds, even thousands of feet of ice a few tens of thousands of years ago. Continental ice shields are nasty but they move slow so getting out of their way is fairly painless.
Now if the New Madrid fault line ever rips loose like it did around 1820, watch out. The biggest of the three big quakes was possibly more powerful then the 1908 San Francisco –often figured as a 8.5 or 8.6 and almost up their with the Good Friday 1964 Alaska quake which may have been a rare 9, 9+. If they happened today, Memphis – which sits on deep alluvial soils -- would be leveled flat, St Louis would have major damage and even Chicago would have some damage. Quakes in the Midwest are not confined by a nearby mountain range unlike California.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
I experienced a minor one in Wales.
Before I was married, so must be over thirty years ago. Apparently we get 500 earth tremors/minor quakes in The UK every year. Thankfully, we're more stable than the US, so don't have the nasty ones they get, although Kent was hit by one in the past year which did quite a lot of damage to buildings.
Angharad
Angharad
Glad you are ok
Hopefully it is not a preshock to a bigger quake.
Hugs,
Kristy
DO NOT stand in the doorway.in a quake
You mentioned at 5.5 check where the doorway is.
If you are going to the doorway, do one of two things. Close the door, or go through it, BUT DO NOT STAND IN IT!
A doorway, with the door open, is the weakest part of a wall. With the door closed it ia significantly stronger.
FEMA and the Red Cross both say
1.a. DROP to the ground; take COVER by getting under a sturdy table or other piece of furniture; and HOLD ON on until the shaking stops.
1.b. If there isn’t a table or desk near you, cover your face and head with your arms and crouch in an inside corner of the building.
1.c Stay away from glass, windows, outside doors and walls, and anything that could fall, such as lighting fixtures or furniture.
2. Stay in bed if you are there when the earthquake strikes. Hold on and protect your head with a pillow, unless you are under a heavy light fixture that could fall. In that case, move to the nearest safe place.2.
3."Use a doorway for shelter only if it is in close proximity to you and if you know it is a strongly supported, load bearing doorway."
Standing in the doorway may be the best way to get hurt in an earthquake.
When we had a 6.3 last fall, Emergency Rooms reported broken,& cut, or crushed fingers,when the doors slammed closed on the fingers.
there were also a few injuries from items falling from shelves*, or furniture which tipped over.
There were no reported injuries from broken glass, or collapsed buildings.
* All of my bookshelves are strapped to the studs in the walls.
For those not fa,milar with the Richter scales, it is logarithmic, meaning that for every full number increase, it is 10 times as strong. Thus, this afternoon's 5.3 was only about 1/1,000th as strong as the 1906 San Francisco quake, and maybe 1/15th as strong as the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake at the start of the World Series.
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
Door check
You're right of course on every bit of that. You check where the door is for the same reason you do so in an airplane, so you know how to get out of the room in an emergency, not during the quake but afterward. Note that I talked about getting under desks, not standing in doorways. :)
I live in a mobile home so my plan is simple, stay away from the windows and cabinets, get off the centerline and hang on tight. Mobile homes sometimes fall off their foundations during earthquakes, even little 4.0s if it hits at the right angle.
My counting algorithm gives you a hyperbolic measure of the earthquake strength which is not the same as a logarithmic one but it's a fair approximation for seat of the pants since it works fairly well in the usual range of noticeable, survivable quakes. :) The guesstimate of distance felt is a truncated asymptotic curve that's neither hyperbolic nor logarithmic but it serves. The counting for distance is based on the different speeds of the transverse and longitudinal waves in surface rock. Deep quakes will screw up the counting system since they travel through mantle as well as crust. If you don't really hear a boom and the growl seems to last forever, it's probably a deep quake.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
makes you wanna yell yee-ha!
I was laying in bed, waking up, some 50 miles from the epicenter during the early 70's Sylmar quake. It was impressive, but not impressive enough, I still had to go to school that day! You feel a couple a year, once I was playing pool in a bar (something i rarely ever did) and the balls started wandering all over the table. The next one that sort of alarmed me was the Whittier Narrows quake of '87. I was working in a fish market at a harbor and worried that it mighta been centered OUT THERE somewhere. Kept watching the horizon west of us, glad to see that it didn't suddenly rise upward. Tsunamis are what scare me. A quake in Alaska in 65 messed up boats in Port of Los Angeles. Another factor for me is where I am. Not so many brick buildings left in the American part of the Ring of Fire but they scare me. Wood and nails has a lot more give, in a wood frame 1 story house you might end up wearing the ceiling plaster but the odds are not the house itself. Having a basement under the whole house scares me ....... A month after I inherited my double wide a few years back there was a 4.0 right under us. And it was right in line with where the 2 halves come together, made them dance with each other. Now there's a bump in the floor right at the joint, but I shined a flashlight underneath & discovered that my Dad, God love him, had gone nuts w/ extra foundation blocks, & everything was at the proper angle. So with earthquakes, just don't live stupidly, like putting yer bed right under a free standing obsidian book case. Tornados on the other hand scare the bejesus out of me, the whole idea
of being yanked up to go flying around with the cows and the gasoline trucks; tiny, ordinarily
harmless things travelling like bullets! As has been pointed out, it's what you know...
~~~hugs, Laika
.
I love your rule-of-thumb designations for magnitudes, Erin. It's just about perfect :)
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
Another word
I forgot another word for earthquake in Southern California, at least. Original E-Ticket. E-tickets in the long ago were Disneyland's most exciting rides, so called because when you bought a book of tickets, they came in grades from A to E. An A ticket was a streetcar, a B was a merry-go-round, etc. The Matterhorn was an E-ticket.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Twister
the whole idea of being yanked up to go flying around with the cows and the gasoline trucks;
When watching "Twister", keep repeating to yourself, "It's only a movie; it's only a movie".
Some chasers blogged about making "Twister - The Comedy" for awhile, before realizing that, to them, the original movie itself is a comedy! ;-)
KJT
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
I'm Reminded
Of the old saw about Civil Defence in the case of a nuclear attack. What do you do? Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
Seriously though, as someone who had never experienced a quake until I went to Papua-New Guinea, I accord them a lot of respect. The first one I was in sounded like an express train coming through, this in a country with no railways! The old hands yawned and said "Just another Guria". Then we had the 7.1 that flattened a coastal town called Madang. We were about 80 or so miles away and it threw us out of bed in the middle of the night. Standing up...Not possible. How long did it last? No idea. It was pitch black and I wasn't counting. You just wait for it to end and hope you're in one piece when it does. They are not something you can fight.
Erin, I'm glad you're OK and hope you never get the BIG ONE,
Hugs,
Joanne
So were they shaking and baking
in Palm Springs? My car alarm went off during the 1999 7.1 quake in the mohave desert I was in Kingman Arizona . I was in bed and didn't feel the tremor but was awakened by the car alarm.The only time that I felt a tremor from a quake was in Maine of all places.Glad to hear your all right.Amy May your pen never run out of ink and your brain out of ideas
The old Saturn V boosters...
Used to produce similar effects when they were being tested at the NASA test center in southern Mississippi... And the building the Held those boosters "still" was REALLY massive...
Annette
earthquakes
I have been through tornadoes (grew up in Kansas), went through a typhoon when I was stationed on Guam, and went through the big quake in northern California in 1989, I will take the earthquakes any time.
Melanie
Like a train going by
I was in Portland Oregon in 1993, when they had their 5.5 earthquake. I was in a cafe' near a rail yard. The whole building shook, just like it always did when a train was going by. None of the patrons even looked up, it wasn't until there was a newsbreak on the TV over the counter that we knew that it wasn't a train.
Mr. Ram