The Language of Love

kali4kneeya, the province of hell fire, brimstone, and earth quacks! Karnak IV, predicted that kali4kneeya will become part of the sea floor on 12/12/2012. Wind up your brains; strap on your roller skates; put Bella in a knapsack, and emigrate to America. It will be tough, as you will have to learn English, and give up those weird things you beings eat out there. Have a care when gliding through ohiyo; you neverknow!

 

Nah, it's all good...it was kinda fun, actually. Well, I say this, and it wasn't very strong, comparatively. It was a killer wave, dude. Sweet.

Yikes! And... Wheeeeee! I don't know whether to envy your experience, or be grateful we don't get more noticeable earthquakes here in New York.

 

In fact, I do remember experiencing a very surprising earthquake on Long Island some years ago. It manifested itself not by one feeling a sensation of rockin' an' rollin' under one's feet, but instead with the roof of the building I was in rattling like crazy in a sweep from one end to the other. I was at work and I remember at the time all of us running outside to see if, somehow, kids had gotten up on the roof of the building and had been running across it. It wasn't until the next day when we read in the news that what we had experienced was a minor earthquake, that we realized what had been going on!

 

But it must be a little scary for you out there in San Francisco and its environs, when this sort of thing happens, as you guys get the Real Deal in earthquakes. I'm sure you probably take a lot of it in your stride, being used to it and all. But there's got to be that thought somewhere in the back of your brain that, maybe, this is going to be the Big One. I saw on the news that a lot of California coastline communities are now doing tsunami drills, as well. Do you have that -- tsunami awareness -- in San Francisco?

 

-- Nephele

Um...well, since the big Tsunami in Indonesia a few years back, any time there's an earthquake in the Pacific region, yes, we get notices about Tsunami Warnings/Watches.

 

But, honestly, I don't think many people think about it much. Let me rephrase: us natives don't. Perhaps those who have moved here are bit more wary, but most of us native (I think) know that it's rare, and that if it happens, we'll get through. Personally, I never think about it...there is a large mountain range (well, for us they're hills, but I guess most would call them mountains), the Coastal Range, which runs down much of the Peninsula south of San Francisco and on down the state...that would protect most all of the major population from a tsunami. There would probably be reverberations in the bay, but again, I don't think that it'd be that bad. Perhaps it's just wishful thinking, too.

 

Eh, yeah, it does shake your nerves a bit, true. But then you realize that nothing happened, that the infrastructure and buildings are all fine, and that it was on a faultline which isn't constructed to have big quakes...5.6 is about as big as the Calaveras line has. (BTW, 'calaveras' means 'skulls' in Spanish...how appropriate!) Yes, there's always the thought in the back of the head about the 'big one' coming, especially on the San Andreas or the Hayward faultlines...but once you realize that the tremors were brief, you know that it's a small one. In fact, if anything, perhaps this one took pressure off of the faultlines.

 

I think what is bothering me most right now is that the news has to have a major story, and so they're playing it up. As I said, I live really close to the epicenter, in a shaky Victorian, and yet I didn't have one item fall off my shelves, no CDs fell off of my rather shaky CD towers...yet if you watch the news, there were plenty of incidents where stuff came flying off store shelves, particularly in San Jose (where I live). Dude, it couldn't have been that bad...if it wasn't for me, then how the hell could it have been for them???

 

Anyway...killer waves, dude

Earthquakes are a trip!

 

I lived in the San Fernando valley (Reseda) for a time when I was young, I remember one time I was riding in my brother's 1968 Charger and the thing started bouncing up and down like it was on hydraulics.

Funny, I was learning plate techtonics and faultlines in Environmental science the other day. I must say, southern California and the coastline got screwed over when God moved the plates. A 5.0 sounds fun, but California unfortunately is a high pressure area where you always get a high magnitude.

Yep...although I'm in what we consider to be 'Northern California' (really, the SF Bay Area is about central, but we just don't want to be lumped in with LA). And we know that earthquakes are commonplace, which is why we practice drills often.

 

Here are two other things to chew on:

1) Much of the area which are affected by quakes has mostly granite and clay, so it takes a decent sized shaker to get us noticing;

 

2) Earthquake technology, from detecting them to the engineering to make structures and infrastructure stronger, has been a crucial area of research here for over 100 years. We have very strict building codes, and have had for about the same amount of time. Honestly, we're more protected from earthquakes than we are floods...simply because we're more likely to have a quake than inundation. We are about as prepared as anyone could be...another reason why we natives are not really worried. We know 'the big one' is coming, but there's not much we can do about it, save for be prepared.