You shook me all night long
So one of the biggest deals here lately has been a series of earthquakes that have evidently been caused by drilling as part of a geothermal project. (While I've never heard of man-made earthquakes, except possibly in the engineering school at my alma mater, drilling around an earthquake fault strikes me as one of those "don't mess with Mother Nature" kind of things.) While everyone else I know seems to have felt the earthquakes, I hadn't felt one since right after moving here...until Friday morning, that is. It was about 5:00am and I was having trouble getting back to sleep when all of a sudden I felt the unmistakeable rock-and-roll of a small earthquake (only 3.3 on the Richter scale).
Possibly the best thing about it wasn't that I finally felt one, but that I didn't react at all. See, prior to 1994 I took earthquakes in stride. Even the 1989 quake in the Bay Area, which was the strongest I had experienced, wasn't so bad because I lived way out in the East Bay where there was no damage. Then came 1994, when I was living in West LA during the Northridge quake. It was the scariest thing I've been through by far--when it was happening I thought there was no way the apartment building could withstand the damage, and it ended up doing a fair bit of damage in the area where I was living (e.g. the collapse of the I-10 freeway down the street). I didn't sleep well for months afterward, and for years I would jump at the sound of loud bangs or sudden shakes, even though I moved to the relatively earthquake-free East Coast in late 1994. To this day I still sometimes have dreams where I'm caught in a big quake. This is all a long way of saying that a few years ago even a small earthquake like the one on Friday would have at least given me a major adrenaline rush, but this time it just felt like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, small little tremblor--the kind any hearty California (or Tokyo or other earthquake-prone area) native would laugh off. It's nice to know that even halfway around the world, I evidently haven't lost touch with my inner Californian...
Possibly the best thing about it wasn't that I finally felt one, but that I didn't react at all. See, prior to 1994 I took earthquakes in stride. Even the 1989 quake in the Bay Area, which was the strongest I had experienced, wasn't so bad because I lived way out in the East Bay where there was no damage. Then came 1994, when I was living in West LA during the Northridge quake. It was the scariest thing I've been through by far--when it was happening I thought there was no way the apartment building could withstand the damage, and it ended up doing a fair bit of damage in the area where I was living (e.g. the collapse of the I-10 freeway down the street). I didn't sleep well for months afterward, and for years I would jump at the sound of loud bangs or sudden shakes, even though I moved to the relatively earthquake-free East Coast in late 1994. To this day I still sometimes have dreams where I'm caught in a big quake. This is all a long way of saying that a few years ago even a small earthquake like the one on Friday would have at least given me a major adrenaline rush, but this time it just felt like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, small little tremblor--the kind any hearty California (or Tokyo or other earthquake-prone area) native would laugh off. It's nice to know that even halfway around the world, I evidently haven't lost touch with my inner Californian...
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