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There’s no warning. One moment you’re standing upon solid earth. The next, the earth drops away from under your feet. The solidity that you have always taken for granted is now in motion with a terrible force that terrifies. Tornadoes have warnings. Hurricanes can be tracked. Floods can be predicted. But there is nowhere to run once a quake begins.
4:40 a.m., June 28, 1992, Southern California.
My wife and I are in bed on a quiet late spring morning. We’re asleep, our dogs restless at our side. Bleary-eyed, I open the sliding bedroom door and let them out. They run about the yard as if searching for something. This isn’t significant. I stumble back to bed.
At 4:47 the sound begins, a subsonic, deep bass. The bed begins shaking,. My wife is instantly alert and clamps a death grip on my arm. The windows are shaking. So far, nothing unusual. California experiences several thousand quakes a year. But this time it doesn’t stop. This time the intensity continues to build.
Outside dogs are barking. I hear explosions and look out the window. The telephone poles are swaying back-and-forth 60-degrees from center. Transformers are exploding. I see showers of sparks flowing over palm trees. Some trees are smoking. Our power goes out. Now the house begins to shake. My wife screams. The house is bouncing, a cement slab and structure weighing several tons. It’s bouncing like a rubber ball because the earth is rolling and the slab is rolling with it. How can this be? Somehow the cement is almost fluid.
Car alarms erupt everywhere. The windows are bowing in and out and I’m suddenly afraid that they’ll shatter and shower us with jagged shards. I pull my wife to the comparable safety of our frame doorway. And still it continues. It’s difficult to stand. The rolling motion combines with a horizontal jerking forward and back, repeating. I look up. The hallway light fixture is swinging back and forth, each swing smacking the fixture against the ceiling. Dishes are falling in the kitchen. Glass is breaking. I can hear the cabinet doors being flung open and contents shooting out across the floor.
Dust is everywhere. From every crack, crevice and hidden patch that has escaped my wife’s fanatical cleaning, dust now erupts into the air. It’s the same outside. I can see clouds of dust rising rapidly. And still the floor rolls and jolts. Quakes we have experienced before, but nothing of this intensity. It won’t stop and seems to have gone on for hours. A mutual thought hits us: is this the Big One? My heart pounds in my chest. I brace myself in the doorway and hold my wife. She’s still screaming, terrified. So am I. Visions of being buried alive flash through my mind. I look up. The house it two-story. Will the framing hold up the second floor?
In the driveway, our car is jolting up and down, rocking to and fro on its springs, a low-rider parody, alarm blaring. The garage door is shaking. Telephone utility poles sway, then lines break and fall. I worry about the electrical lines and watch them swaying like a giant jump rope.
And still it continues, building, building, the shaking not stopping. There’s no place to go. No place to run to. Where can you run when the earth shakes? We do what we can. We pray.
On my desk I see my computer bouncing on my desk matching beat to the 60+ pound laser printer slamming up and down like a yo-yo.
The shaking intensifies, slamming us side to side.
Then suddenly it’s over.
I hold my wife close, trying to calm her as I will my heart to slow. Adrenaline is roaring through my veins. My breathing is ragged, gasping. Dust fills my lungs. I feel a pressure in my ears. I hold my wife until she stops trembling. It takes a long time. The quake seems like it lasted for an hour. But it’s over. When my wife is calm enough, I gently disengage her death grip on my body, slip on shoes and go to check the utility connections and damage.
The kitchen is a mess. Food, milk, orange juice, containers, dishes and glass are strewn across the floor. I close the refrigerator door as I pass. It’s pulled away from the wall, holding on by its cord. I smell gas so I shut off the stove’s gas line because the stove has also moved away from the wall, the gas line stretched tight. Glass crunches beneath my feet. All the cabinets have opened. Chairs are overturned. The heavy ornamental iron kitchen table moved. Lamps have fallen. Tables upended. Furniture moved.
Outside, I quickly locate the gas line and shut it off, then do a visual damage inspection. The driveway is cracked in several places and has upheaved near the garage. Some tree limbs have fallen. Narrow cracks have appeared in the masonry foundation, but don’t look too serious. The chimney is intact.
My dogs come up to me to check on what I’m doing. They’re uncharacteristically cowed and lean against me for contact. Together we check the rest of the house. Amazingly no broken windows, no major damage that I can see. No broken water lines. The telephone lines are down, pulled away from the house. The utility pole behind our yard now leans at a 20-degree angle and the electrical lines hang low enough to touch.
The car alarms subside. Then I notice how quiet it has become. No birds. No traffic. No noise.
Neighbors venture out of the their homes. I check with the widow who lives next door. She’s OK, just shaken. Neighbors who never speak to one another suddenly seek comfort, asking about damage and if everyone is OK.
I go back in the house to my wife who has started cleaning the mess while listening to the portable AM radio. The announcer tells us there has been a major quake near Landers in Southern California. Thanks for the news flash. We know. Our house is located roughly 80 miles from the epicenter of the quake. Eighty miles! I can’t imagine what it was like for folks who lived closer.
We begin to relax, to talk, to smile, because it’s over.
But it isn’t.
At 8:05 a.m., a second 6.4 quake hits Big Bear, California, less than 25 miles away, with an intensity although less than the first, is all the more terrifying coming so quickly after the other. We survive it, clinging to one another in a doorway.
Aftershocks continue for weeks. You never get used to it. Small quakes happen all the time. Since then, we always pause, waiting: is this the Big One?
The Landers quake was 7.3 on the Richter scale.
Not the Big One.
Not yet.
I’ll forego that experience.
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