I felt the 2011 Japan earthquake in Dalian, China, a thousand miles away. I was awake early and nursing our baby when everything swayed. I thought, “why is everything moving?” Of course, I learned the reason later that day, and felt so much sorrow for the people in Japan who lost so much.
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My brothers and I lost our childhood home and our family's gravesite in the last Christchurch earthquake. One of my brothers lives in Santa Rosa. I know he has his car ready to go with enough kit to survive for a week for him, his wife and their two dogs. It's what they did after evacuation from the fire raging down on their home. I hope most Californians are as ready as they are, but nature is more powerful than we can ever hope to be.
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I have lived in Southern California for 17 years. I don’t worry about earthquakes. When it’s your time, it’s your time. I grew up dodging tornados in Oklahoma. Every part of the world has good stuff and bad stuff.
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I used to think the movie San Andreas was just that - a movie- but it could become real as in the “big one” when it does in fact take place.
Would you please be more geographically specific in your reporting? By writing "Southern California," instead of Mojave, it's like you're describing New Jersey when an incident took place in Georgia.
Frightened friends and relatives will thank you.
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A few years back we were driving through the Napa Valley en-route to our friend's house in the Oakland Hills with whom we were staying when an earthquake on the Hayward fault hit. Being in a car miles away we didn't feel it. But later on around 6 pm or so as we were sitting down for dinner at our friend's house an aftershock occurred. There was a boom, our dining room table literally lifted off the floor and the wall cracked. The epicenter of the original quake had been about a half-mile away.
The Bay Area is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
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I've experienced four earthquakes with the '89 earthquake being the most dramatic. Interestingly, the first one happened just as I was reviewing earthquake preparedness material and thinking I wouldn't need it! Now I keep an earthquake preparedness kit in a large suitcase with wheels as well as 30 gallons of water. About a dozen of my SF neighbors have undergone training. It makes sense to learn everything you can and be prepared with a battery-operated radio, first aid kit, MREs, etc. Almost every disaster reveals being prepared as much as possible is better than waiting for help.
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@Ann We were living in the Bay Area during the '89 quake, and although we live 3,000 miles or so away now, we still have our earthquake preparedness kit. It comes in handy for power outages. It's a comfort to know we are ready, but over the years, we have switched out the battery-operated radio with a solar powered one. We also have a solar powered lantern for each person. We keep them in a bay window, so they are charging all the time. It beats rotating batteries out of the kit. Good luck to you!
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It was very early in the morning, a Monday, middle of January and a work day. I lived in a old apartment in the Hollywood Hills, so even when the shaking started it was loud, and it got very loud. The noise more frightening than the shaking. It didn't last long, the worst maybe 35 seconds. All I could managed was to sit in bed and wait. It left very little damage, a few broken glasses, got dressed and went outside, where many of my neighbors, some half a sleep and in a daze. It turned out to be a gorgeous Southern California winter sunny day of 65 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, and I got to know my neighbors well. It turned out to be devastating to infrastructure, but the early time probably saved hundreds of lives. That was the Northridge earthquake, the last big one to hit LA, over 25 years ago.
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As an adopted son of California, I admit thinking that our beneficent tech masters brilliantly purchased prime real estate in 21st century Pompeii... at least it’s sunny!
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This quake seemed particularly long. At first, I was like, “Hub. An earthquake.” But after
it kept going, I jumped up and grabbed my daughter to find a good place to hunker down. She’s 4 and was worried that there was going to be a tsunami. We are in downtown LA. “No, baby. We are safe.”
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"This is the time in California where you want to stay on your toes," is an ironic way to end this article.
More like get on your knees and practice your desk diving skills!
Grew up in California, and have to say after two large earthquakes you can actually feel (without wondering if it's an earthquake) in the Inland Empire... right after each other... does have a lot of us getting ready for the big one.
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How do scientists know that the 6.4 was not itself one of the "before shocks" and that a much larger one is coming in the next couple of weeks?
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Add MyShake to your phone. It will record shaking and send the results to a lab that collects and analyzes the data. Your phone has a sophisticated chip that recognizes movement.
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People in S. Cal are moving out in droves. Arizona's population is increasing exponentially and home prices there are rising to keep up with the demand. Two reasons for this: The taxes in CA are very high and the fear of more devastating earthquakes lurks in every Californian's head.
As someone who grew up in California (0-18), it's always so entertaining to read and hear other people's opinions about my state.
Leave us alone, please. I don't judge Minnesota for random stuff I hear about on the internet.
People move in this country, for various reasons. Unless you personally know every transplant, what you say is based off of a small sample size. So let's keep such definitive "there are two reasons" statements to ourselves.
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@Jonathan Campbell
I would argue until yesterday earthquakes weren't even on the minds of my fellow Southern Californians. We hadn't felt anything resembling a quake since the mexicali earthquake in 2010. Did a bunch of people leave or something yesterday?
Taxes may be doing it though, my old company (small 30-50ish employees, manufacturing - been here since the 70's) is planning to move to Texas in the next year or so I hear.
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@JD
Regarding Californians moving to Texas for lower taxes: you get what you pay for. Also, Texas property taxes are higher than California's.
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Robin Williams once said that earthquakes are Mother Natures way of saying get off my back. If you build and live on an active fault line. Then you have to expect earthquakes from time to time. They keep saying that they are expecting the big one a magnitude 8.0 or greater. They can't pin it down with exact certainty. Could be next year could be 100 years from now. But, it is coming.
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I'm supposed to visit a brother in LA next week. I'm a little hesitant.........
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Better make that Lower Alabama or Louisiana.
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@Forgotten White Male
Funny I’m seeing MY brother in San Fran and am also a bit nervous.
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The big one is long overdue!
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Anyone else concerned about and wondering why this cluster of quakes is right under the China Lake Navy weapons testing area?
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@andy
No, not really.
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I remember the Mineral earthquake in Virginia many years ago. We felt it in Fairfax City some 90+ miles from the epicenter.
This is why I do not want to live in California.
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Was that the one that happened near the 10th anniversary of 9/11? If so, I was working in a building right on top of Crystal City metro when the earthquake happened. Of course I thought a bomb had gone off!
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@Lee As the crow flies I was around 350 miles from Mineral, Va., but we felt the quake where I worked, approximately 100' above ground. But people close to the ground in ordinary homes and at lower levels around here didn't feel it.
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In August 2011, I was sitting in a faculty meeting with a bit of anxiety because I planned to announce my retirement to my colleagues. I started to speak and then the building trembled. Earthquake. Was the universe speaking to me? I feel the earth move . . . Then I made my announcement, which turned out not to be much of a seismic event to others, just me.
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The floor lamp banging against the wall this morning seemed odd, I thought. So I looked at the ceiling fan, which wasn't moving. Back asleep I went. Thank you for confirming that there was an aftershock this morning at 4am. Yesterday, as I folded laundry, I felt a tremor and thought "Am I having a seizure?" (Not that I've ever had one...) The swinging light fixture and ceiling fans confirmed that I wasn't...and that it was an earthquake. "Very interesting." Meanwhile, it was strong enough to rouse my sleeping twenty year olds from their slumber.
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We felt a jolt in Detroit last weekend while in the Institute of Art. Because the Great Lakes weigh so much with their massive volume of water that earth's crust cannot support the burden without "twitching" regularly. Here in the Chicago area jolts of 4 or less are regular for that reason. No one should be complacent about seismic activities, since all of North America is susceptible to earthquakes. Some like the New Madrid Quake in the early 19th century were of devastating impact...
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@Tournachonadar how does one live non-complacently? Squirrel away rations? Widen our stance as we walk? Wear headgear? That’s not realistic for most North Americans you say are under ever present threat. I grew up in Chicago— we once had an earthquake drill in school because some noted psychic predicted a major quake. That is my only memory of earthquakes— they’re unpredictable even to psychics.
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As a sixth generation Northern California resident, earthquakes are a fact of life at a low level and an infrequent catastrophic event. Our farmlands are Alluvium with shallow water tables and they MOVE.
I reached down for a piece of irrigation pipe when the ground suddenly dropped 3 feet and then watched as the land rolled both directions from me. I was on the actual epicenter of a 5.9 earthquake! Because I understood the seismology of our soils, I was not scared but did go check all of the buildings for damage. There was no structural damage except a 100 year old chimney.
But as a result of the bookcase that toppled on my bed, I reinforced the 1870s and 1910 parts of our home and built in bookcases. That reinforcement directly assured the house stayed standing in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (AKA 1989 SF quake).
I also did earthquake reinforcement of barns etc. between those quakes, with further after the 1989 quake. The result was NO damage on the reinforced buildings.
When I built a new farm shop in 1986/7 it incorporated many measures to avoid earthquake damage - not even cracks in the concrete floor and foundation resulted.
The point of all of this is that for low buildings primarily made of wood (under 50 feet height), new construction and retrofitting can easily protect from nearly all damage IF the designers and construction people know their job and do it. Not doing so is always more expensive.
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@Organic Vegetable Farmer-Thanks for this detailed and intelligent summary. I hope many others are following your advice. We love our Farmer's Markets and want our farmers to prosper.
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Earthquake insurance is extremely expensive and if the "big one" ever really hit there won't be enough money from the insurance companies to even cover everything. Was going to be into the thousands of dollars per month with a $250,000 deductible.
Seriously why would you ever get earthquake insurance at that point?
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@John
I was in the Northridge earthquake in '94 and we had a good bit of damage. Luckily, I had earthquake insurance. We just got our first home and the additional insurance premium was nominal. The insurance company, 20th Century, started denying most of the claims. Somehow, ours slipped by. Now getting it doesn't seem worth the cost, as you said. I figure if the damage is that bad, we will just have to move on.
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@John I guess we are lucky, we do have a large deductible, but still less than $100,000 and our payment for the year is just over $1,000. I think it’s well worth it. We are in SoCal, close to Pasadena.
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Wrong. Our CA earthquake insurance is $100/yr and would cover rebuilding our house.
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Earthquake insurance is prohibitively expensive.
I can rebuild my chimney for the cost of the deductible alone.
Can't afford $7000 a year.
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One of my cousins lived in Southern California for many years. He never liked it there, but the work he did was in great demand and he made a nice living. The threat and event of earthquakes and the feeling of those aftershocks never sat well with him or his wife.
This spring they finally decided to leave Southern California and move . . . to Phoenix. He called me this morning and said they felt the earthquake. He's rethinking his move to Phoenix. Perhaps it wasn't far enough.
Only one time did I feel the unsteadiness of an earthquake. It was back in June, 1987. The rumble of this moderate earthquake was felt throughout the Midwest, including Chicago where I lived then and continue to live. I was working at a bookstore and suddenly the floor felt like it had shifted, and books fell from the shelves. Weird, scary, and unsettling. I can't image what a more intense earthquake feels like. And hope I never do.
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Here in San Diego's North County, I didn't feel a thing this time. I did feel the 2010 Easter Sunday 7.2 quake in northern Baja.
Working on the computer at the time, I noticed the screen start to shake, and thought, "P-waves. No big deal." In a few seconds the S-waves arrived, producing the alarming sensation of violent back-and-forth motion. Bigger deal, but it didn't seem too bad for the first 5 seconds or so . . . .
As it continued, I found myself transitioning from, "This is interesting, to this is interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse, 'may you live in interesting times, to duck and cover." Then it stopped abruptly (note to self: next time, straight to "duck and cover").
Systems capable of detecting the initial P-waves hold promise. In use in Japan, and now here too, such systems may save lives by stopping trains and elevators, and so on.
Still, the "Big One" is coming, and all our "systems" are no match for tectonic plates.
At the moment, though, I'm more concerned about excess heat in Alaska than a little shaking in California. We can't stop the shaking, but if we fail to address the anthropomorphic climate change, the shaking will continue, but there may not be as many of us around to feel it.
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Having been in Mexico City for the big one in ‘84, I am well aware of the damage to lives and livelihoods that a major earthquake can cause. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Californians are so lackadaisical about earthquake preparedness. They even had a “dry-run” with the San Francisco earthquake in the 90s (which was only a 7) and yet still insurance rates lag and, worse still, building code enforcement is spotty. There have been plenty of examples, both on the value of preparedness (e.g., Japan, Mexico) and on the consequences of a lack thereof (e.g., Italy, Indonesia). What more evidence do they need? What are people waiting for???
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@Jess: My guess: fatalism. There seems to be even a feeling that it would be a relief to get the Big One over with. Foolish indeed, but in a country where climate change is up for debate, an anti-vaccination movement gains credibility, and we "need" 300,000,000 guns to protect ourselves against the US Army, perhaps not so surprising?
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I love California but I’m not planning to visit any time soon. I prefer having a few days lead time for a Miami hurricane. Ridiculous, I know.
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Regarding Earthquake Insurance, it should be noted that in the entire history of the Coachella Valley not one nickel has every been paid out in Earthquake Insurance because the deductibles are so high and I can see the San Andreas fault from my roof. If the "big one" strikes the insurance chaos and their potential bankruptcies has led me to "self insure". I'm not a gambler, but too much of my house (and everyone else's) would need to be destroyed before any insurance kicks in.
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@Davis Wong
Dad was with State Farm during the ‘94 earthquake and wasn’t rich at all. In fact, he had fallen behind on his earthquake insurance payments because of the debt load of raising five children but walked the last catchup payment into the local State Farm office two weeks before the earthquake hit. I’m sorry I don’t have the particulars but he did have to scrape together a fairly large deductible but it was worth it for compensation of over $150,000 of damage.
It’s probably best to think of earthquake insurance more as a catastrophic policy than something to cover small cosmetic cracks and minor damage. He doesn’t bother reporting things from the various smaller quakes (plaster cracks are all over the house by now) and is saving all the payouts for the next big one.
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@Davis Wong I wouldn't do without it--$50,000 deductible, premiums are about $1000 per year. Our state requires that insurance companies offer it.
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@Davis Wong: Sure, Another factor is that much of the value of a residence in over-priced California lies in the land, not the buildings on it.
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In LA now, and the house shook us pretty good. Being “on your toes” is, literally, bad advice lol. Getting out of the house is good advice.
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San Diegan here, a transplant from the Midwest. Experienced my first tremblor Easter Sunday, 2010. Sounded like a huge truck driving by my home, then the water in the pool started sloshing around like crazy. The "passing train" Jay mentions is also a very good description. Coming from a region with occasional tornadoes, I reflexively ran *indoors* and hid under the dining room table, exactly the opposite of what one should do during an earthquake. But I lived, and learned! lol
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@Charles Dean - Running indoors is not the right thing to do, but if you had been indoors when the quake occurred then going under the table is the correct thing to do. Grab a table leg, hold on, and move with the table so that anything falling hits the table instead of hitting you.
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@MCF
After my divorce, I decided to move back in with my now elderly parents since I have no children and their house is quite large for seniors in their late 80s. I have my own “wing” and was sitting right next to the door to my patio when it hit. Under normal circumstances, the correct move is to immediately exit but my first inclination was to head deeper into the house to find my parents.
One of my most powerful memories is of my dad’s actions during the chaos of the ‘71 Sylmar earthquake. I shared a room with my younger sister while sister number 3 was still in a bassinet with my parents. I had amassed a glass animal collection from our visits to my mother’s family in Mexico and I awoke that morning to the sound of one of them falling from the hutch to the dresser. I thought it was my parents but they weren’t in the room. I went back to sleep only to wake again to the bed shaking and my dad crying out, “girls, girls we have to go!” as he scooped my sister from her bed and motioned me to follow. The place was rocking and rolling as I made my way through a shower of glass animals. The hutch fell over just after I passed through the shower. We all huddled under a solid walnut dining room table until it passed.
My parents’ room was close to the front door but while mom took the baby, dad turned towards our bedroom at the other end of the hall. I remembered that day as I headed deeper into the house yesterday to find them both.
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@MCF
Thank you! I will! Or, hopefully won't need to :)
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I was a young child in the San Fernando Valley when the 1971 Sylmar quake happened and was back home visiting my parents’ house three miles away from the Northridge epicenter during the 1994 quake. Dad, luckily, had just then caught up with his late payments on the earthquake insurance before it hit and caused over $150,000 in damage.
Yesterday’s quake was a nice little roll and this morning’s aftershock was a bump that woke me from sleep. I’ve been putting fragile things and breakables on lower shelves or in protective environments purposely for a few years now. It’s only matter of time but at least we don’t have an annual earthquake “season” like they do in hurricane country. We do have “fire season” though.
Still, the liberal “live and let live” spirit of the place makes fire and an occasional earthquake worth it all.
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Having lived in Los Angeles for 41 years, I can say you get used to earthquakes. I switched to drinking bottled water years ago after the 1994 quake solely because I want to have a stock of water in the house at all times. When an earthquake starts you step away from any obvious hazards and start guessing the magnitude and the distance of the epicenter from you. If you're in the midst of a big one you start thinking about what it's going to cost to fix things.
The truly odd thing is when you are visiting somewhere not known for earthquakes and you experience one. That happened once when I was visiting my elderly parents who live in a much less seismically active place (Fresno, California). It wasn't a major one, of course, but it was unmistakeable to this Los Angeleno. They didn't even know what it was.
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@Flaminia I can only imagine. A few years ago in NY metro area there was an earthquake. Minor in CA terms. I felt the sofa move under me for like 2 sec and was thinking ‘am I dizzy, or was than an earthquake?” But I was kidding, or soI though. If I hadn’t been sitting quietly working from home, may not have noticed. Turned on TV and it was. Folks on Wall Street freaked out thinking another 9/11 type incident.
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Having grown up in San Francisco, I can say there is nothing quite like an earthquake, that moment when you think," is this the Big One," as windows rattle with a sound like a passing train.
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