I feel the earth move under my feet,
I feel the sky tumblin’ down…
– Carole King
After seismic rumblings in the financial markets all summer and continuing aftershocks in the economy, finally, the earth also shook, quite literally along the east coast this week, surprising the heck out of everyone who lives in an area more accustomed to hurricanes than earthquakes. But then, after my last column observing what a topsy-turvy world it has become, why should it be a surprise that a 5.8 temblor would hit Virginia and be felt from Maine to the Carolinas?
I was upstairs writing on my computer when I felt the tremors and noticed the blinds quivering and then the chandelier swaying. Naturally, my first instinct was to blame the kids. Was Will really jumping around that violently and shaking the whole house? And then in the very next second, I had a sense of déjà vu, having lived in California for more than a decade and experiencing that eerie sense of undulating earth many times.
Bill’s first reaction in his midtown New York office was to wonder if the shaking was his imagination. Had his family finally succeeded in driving him crazy? Or had he come down with something and was suffering vertigo when his chair moved on its own and the bookshelves shuddered?
Human nature being what it is, after checking on your loved ones to make sure they’re safe, the next thing is to connect with others to make sure you haven’t gone to the loony bin yourself. I called my next-door neighbor, Stephanie, who was on the phone with her friend in West Windsor confirming that she, too, had felt the earthquake. And so it was real.
And then, if any more confirmation was needed, the phone lines exploded, the Twitterfest ignited, and Facebook was all abuzz. My friend, Pete, a news producer in California, posted, well, there goes tonight’s lead. It was no longer going to be Libya, but the seismic weirdness that cracked monuments in our nation’s capital and produced a surge of post 9/11 could-it-be-happening-again panic at the Pentagon.
Bill connected with friends in Virginia who live not too far from the quake’s epicenter who reported that their two children reacted in completely opposite ways to the shaking in their house, which was considerably more pronounced than it was here in central New Jersey. Their daughter, just a little younger than Will, came screaming to her mother asking if they were all going to die together this day. Their son, who is Will’s age and something of a savant, pronounced something along the lines of, “given the amount of movement, I would say this is an earthquake that could be no more than 6.4.” His father, who has grown accustomed to his son’s odd moments of insight, nonetheless still was surprised, saying he didn’t even know they were studying that Richter scale stuff in school.
This week’s east coast earthquake was a relatively minor event, especially compared to the wave of killer natural disasters that have been hitting across the world and the rest of the country. Emergency preparedness is much more top of mind in places like California, with its well-known fault lines, and for a time we lived in a San Francisco suburb and worked two bridges away from our then very small children. If the phone lines were down, how would we get in touch? Who would they stay with? What if we were stranded in the city?
We had an emergency supply kit in the closet holding flashlights and batteries, a battery-operated radio, water, and canned food. Here, living in central New Jersey, in terms of emergency supplies at the ready, not so much. Unfortunately, disaster preparedness in our area might have more relevance in terms of terrorism, but no matter what the cause, it’s a good idea to have a Plan A in place. Where would you meet up? How would you check in on elderly parents? For animal lovers like us, how would you care for your pets?
On another note, earthquakes in our area are so rare that even seismologists admit that we just don’t have a huge volume of knowledge about how they might affect our structures. In San Francisco, high rises are built on rollers designed to move with the earth to minimize shaking and damage up along the building. But what about New York City with its towering skyline? A quake with a 5.8 magnitude centered in Virginia that cracked the Washington Monument in D.C. could do horrific damage with an epicenter in Times Square.
I did not run around the house checking for damage –– that would have been overkill –– but then again, why should that idea be so farfetched, given that I just observed a water stain in Will’s ceiling indicating roof damage from the recent punishing rains? I’m also not running out to purchase earthquake insurance, even if it were offered around here, but anyone living in the low-lying areas of this state knows that flood insurance is vital.
I already have so much to worry about that I am not adding this one to the list. But I did scoff at the notion that the Big One would hit while we lived in California and was proven wrong by the deadly Loma Prieta quake that hit the week we were married, taking out the bridge that Bill crossed every day to work. And we all know that the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is just around the corner. Given that today’s world is constantly reminding us to expect the unexpected, it seems that preparing for any eventuality, even just mentally, is a wise thing to do.
