Why is the good china falling?

Apparently there was another earthquake in LA tonight. <a class="postlink" href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/09/35-earthquake-is-second-of-week-in-beverly-hills.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2 ... hills.html</a>

I've lived in Southern CA for almost 7 years total now, never felt a fucking one. I much preferred MN, where if there was a tornado, everyone knew it was there. Sky turns pea-green, you all go up on the roof to watch until it gets scary close, then go in the basement.

Focus: Have you ever been in/near a natural disaster? How did you react?

 

I've posted before about being nearly washed off the then new John Ross bridge in the mid-1980's here in KwaZulu-Natal? I seem to recall it was caused by a tropical cyclone named Demoine (sp? I don't think it's spelled like the city in the U.S..). We got over the bridge a few minutes before flood waters washed it away. Bear in mind that this was a concrete bridge that was less than 2 years old! Yes, we were in a car - it was my mom's then work vehicle, an Opel Rekord (the Aussies here will know of those badged as Chevrolets). We were travelling back from the town of Eshowe, where my mom had been giving a presentation about bather safety in KZN's waters. Natal gets a really bad tropical cyclone about every 20 years or so - we had another bad one in 2006 that wiped out many of the beaches along the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal.

Apparently I was asleep in the back seat of the car at the time. My parents recall it as a frightening experience, so I'll take their word for it.

 

There's a sentence you don't come across too often.

 

When I lived in Lafayette, the Wabash river regularly flooded up over roads. People who lived down there just knew the detours because it happened at least once a year. My work office happened to be on the road that ran along the river and flooded, so they had a contingency plan which consisted of "don't come to the office and work from home for a few days." Coincidentally, I always rooted for the river to flood.

The worst it got, though, was when it started to get into the farm fields. There was a massive storm that rolled through, and I can still distinctly recall driving down streets with at least two inches of standing water in them, with more rain coming down. The next day, fields in the area were completely flooded, and lots of crops were lost. I guess the river hadn't gotten that high in decades.

I will say this, any time there is so much as lightning, my wife quickly goes down to the basement. Keep in mind, she has never seen a tornado, and every home she has ever lived in has never had so much as a broken window from a storm, but she still insists on hiding in the basement, in the crawl space under the stairs. I enjoy standing and looking out the windows at the storm rolling through, until she screams at me to come down stairs.

The worst around here was a wind storm. No tornado, but straight line winds that got up to about 90 MPH. The winds took out power lines, took out power to the town (in some areas it was out for three days, like our house), blew over trees, and even ripped the awning off of the front of my wife's church and took out most of the windows. They said the damage was so bad because her church is literally in the middle of a farm field, with absolutely nothing to block the wind. In town, there were some downed branches, some of them pretty big, but that was it.

 

When I was 10, my Eastern European family spent half a year in central US. My parents didn't really know much about tornadoes, just that it's a big air funnel that takes roofs or something. So when on a beautiful sunny day in mid July the TV and radio was screaming 'tornado warning', my parents did the sensible thing. They looked outside at the absolutely clear sky, and decided to go shopping with me and my little sis. Because, yeah right, a big storm from a completely clear sky, nobody is that dumb, nice try Weather Channel.
We went into the shopping mall at noon, it was still sunny and warm, clear skies. Shopping mall was quite empty. Haha, all those scared dumbasses staying home hiding on this perfectly nice day. We came out 2 hours later, it was getting really dark, raining, and the wind was very strong. We ran to the car, and then my dad tried driving home. The thing is, it suddenly got pitch dark, and with the heavy rain the visibility was a couple feet at best. We were the only idiots on the road. When we somehow made it home, the water was to our ankles, and the wind was bending nearby trees and sending stuff flying, so we just ran inside our apartment, where my parents proceeded to yell at each other for not listening to the weather report, all the while trying to figure out what is the hiding strategy in a tornado in a shitty top floor apartment without a single piece of sturdy non-Ikea furniture. I don't remember being afraid as much as I remember being really confused, I never saw weather do anything like that before (or after).
This particular tornado killed 2 people and injured over a 100. We were pretty lucky we were on the outskirts.

 

Been near a whole bunch, but never in any real danger. The Black Saturday fires in February of 2009. I was doing shift work at the time, and after sleeping most of the day, had to get a new pair of shoes for work. I remember seeing and smelling smoke in the air, ducked in and bought a pair (of shoes), and when I walked back out the street I was greeted with the sight of a giant wall of smoke bearing down, ominously in the distance. Which isn't a nice thing to find, but wasn't uncommon for that time of year.
I finished my shift (I think it was a short one, went home to bed. And when I woke up the next day, half the state was on fire. The overall death toll of 173 might not seem overly massive, but entire towns were destroyed, and if the wind blew in the wrong direction, mine would have gone too. There were various causes of the fires state-wide, our local one was arson. Some reject nutbar lit two fires and was charged with one count each of arson causing death, intentionally lighting a bushfire, and possession of child pornography. I just don't get pyros.
Two days later, the police sent out an SMS message to anyone with a mobile phone waring us to be alert to any fire danger.

Fast-forward to February 2011, and Cyclone Yasi kicked the shit out of the top end of the country. We just had a few storms down south, but I was with some mates at the north border of the state, celebrating a bucks weekend on a houseboat on a river (no strippers, just porn playing on the TVs and piped out the PA).
There had already been some minor flooding, but the second day the nearby town got flooded out. I called my girlfriend back home, 6 hours away, and told her not to worry, the best place to be in a flood was a boat. I don't know if that logic holds true, but that's what we stuck with. It was like Noah's Ark, only more homoerotic.

 

A few years ago, a pretty substantial earthquake hit off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. I was living on Oahu at the time and was on the 17th floor of a 17 floor building. I was asleep when it started, but you can bet your ass I was awake for the finish. The building started waving back and forth as I clung to the edges of my bed. After about fifteen seconds, it stopped. I got up and threw on some clothes while my brother stumbled out of his room.

My brain did this:
Earthquake...?
No. It's Hawaii.
Ring of fire, stupid.
There are cracks in the concrete building.
Aftershock possibility.
GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE BUILDING!

My brother's dumbass dog refused to walk down the fire escape, so he had to carry a 30 pound pitbull puppy down 17 flights of stairs. As soon as our building manager gave us the all clear, we went back up to our house and spent the day without power. I won three games of Monopoly. I'm pretty sure that if civilization ended, I'd fucking shoot myself.

 

Grew up in SoCal Earthquake Country and there's not much to speak of. It's been nearly 20 years since we had a serious earthquake with big damage where more than a couple people died (Northridge 1994: 57 deaths, $15B+ in property damage). The building codes here are extremely good, such that an earthquake that would cause devastation elsewhere (like a 6.5 in Turkey) is a ho-hum temblor here.

I've probably been through four or five really good earthquakes - Whittier Narrows, Northridge, Landers / Big Bear, El Mayor-Cucapah and another half-dozen "meh" ones (i.e. the building gets evacuated for 20 minutes), and then little shakers here and there.

How did I react? Like an ordinary sane person. When I was a kid, we'd all stumble downstairs and get under the Designated Doorframe, the only two-door-wide interior doorframe in the house. Nowadays, I mostly get up and stand in the door of my office until they tell us whether to leave or not.

I remember the Landers/Big Bear quakes pretty well. For those of you not from SoCal, there was a big earthquake early in the morning, and then about three hours later there was another big one. Not an aftershock strictly, but a "related" earthquake. This was on a Sunday, so everybody was home and few people had to go to work that day. So the family was all up and we were wired from all the excitement. Since we couldn't go back to sleep, we decided to watch a movie we had rented, Oliver Stone's JFK, which we hadn't seen and was just out on VHS.

While watching the movie, there were a number of small aftershocks we could feel. And then probably a bunch we thought we felt, but were just imagining. When the Big Bear quake hit, we were like "ooh another aftershock"...but this one was clearly bigger than the rest. So again we headed for the Designated Doorframe, waited for things to stop shaking, and headed back to watch the rest of the movie.

A few years ago I was working in a high-rise on about the 15th floor when a sizable quake hit. These buildings are all built on rollers (no, seriously) so they swing back and forth for a while gently, but for longer than the actual quake. I think it's amplified a little the further you go up. I remember feeling the movement and was confused. Then, all the shitty vertical blinds in the office behind me whacked up against the right side of the window, and a few seconds later they swung over and whacked up against the left side of the window. I wasn't scared, per se, but the 15th floor of a building is not my #1 choice for places to be during an earthquake.

A loud woman with a terribly annoying New York accent two offices over was going "OH MOI GAWD I THWOUGHT I WAS HAYVING A STROWKE. OH MOI GAWWD IT WAS JUST AN OITHQUAYKE!" This was far more annoying than the actual quake.

Security came on the PA and told everybody to hold tight, then eventually decided that going outside would be overkill, so everyone just got back to work. This is very typical.

Maybe eventually The Big One will hit ("The Big One", an 8.0+ on the San Andreas, was the big seismic bogeyman when I was young, and it still is but it's much less prominent now), but really nature has been kind to me and mine.

If you really hate nature, though, there's a place for you. You can go to Kingman, AZ. Slogan: ESCAPE NATURE'S FURY!!. No, I am not making that up. It's apparently in between all of the natural disasters that happen in the U.S.

Having been to Kingman, I can tell you that while your chances of dying of a natural disaster there are small, the chances of you dying of boredom are high. It's also in the middle of Arizona and it's hot as balls there.

 

I remember that one. I was in Santa Monica at the time, and the Landers hit, and I woke up half way through as car alarms started going off like crazy. We then went to church later in the day when Big Bear hit. The church was packed more than usual, big natural events do that.

The chandeliers in the church started swinging violently back and forth, and people started running for the exits. (including me, I wanted to make sure the donuts were safe). We were lucky no one was hurt, and that the building didn't get damaged, as two years later there Northridge damaged the church pretty badly.

Come to think of it, the early 90s really were a boom time for quakes in California. I have a feeling that so cal will see a 6.0 within the next couple of years.

 

I haven't been in any major disasters myself. The closest I've been was on 22 February last year when people at my work swore that they could feel a small earthquake (I didn't notice). It turned out that this wasn't a small earthquake, it was this earthquake which killed 185 people 450km away in Christchurch. Thanks to social media we all knew about it within about 10 minutes, and immediately the phone lines were jammed by everybody in the country trying to contact people they knew which was a pretty scary time as I had family there. My cousin was in class during the earthquake and decided the only thing to do was to walk home to his second floor apartment. As he walked up the street, he could see inside his living room because the wall wasn't there anymore and some of his furniture was lying on the street.

Now every time there is a small earthquake, particularly if it goes on a while, we get worried that it's a big earthquake somewhere else rather than a small one here. Something to think about when you live on top of several fault lines.

 

I live just outside of Baton Rouge so, the major ones I can remember off the top of my head are Hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, Rita, Ike, Gustav, and here recently, Isaac.

We are far enough north of the New Orleans (roughly 80 miles) that we generally do not the full brunt of the storm.
However, if memory serves me right, with Katrina & Rita and then again with Ike and Gustav, those storms happened within weeks of each other and in my particular location, we got the east side of the storm with one, then the west side of the other...so whatever was not damaged or was weakened by the winds blowing from one direction were damaged further or finished off by the following storm.

Isaac was a little different because of how he decided to just stop and piss all over the Gulf Coast for days on end. Even at the height of it we were saying to ourselves, "Alright, fuck....enough...let's GO!"

 

I stood next to Kelly Osbourne once. I felt like I needed to take a shower.

 

And, after it does finally get up and go and Entergy fucking finally turns the lights back on, you look outside and stare at the mess for a minute or so and then go get brooms, shovels, rakes, and trash bags, clean everything up and go on about your life.

Of course my house is 100 years old and has been through probably ten of these fuckers and is still standing and my neighborhood doesn't flood, so I'll admit we have it easier than most.