Quake!

I'm sure you've heard the news about the earthquake near Los Angeles yesterday – a 5.4 temblor (the big blue square on the map at right). This is a sort of medium-sized earthquake, but the most powerful one we've had since the Northridge quake in the early '90s.

At the time it struck, I was working in my company's offices in Solana Beach, in the building the employees affectionately call the “wooden spaceship” (for its slight resemblence to the disk of Star Trek's Starship Enterprise). From our perspective there were two phases: first a kind of exaggerated rumbling that many of us thought was caused by heavy footsteps, followed in a few seconds by distinct transverse waves (side-to-side motion) large enough to move the building an inch or two. Wooden buildings have a bit of “give” to them, so they move a little more than a steel or concrete building of the same size would. Nobody panicked, or was even truly frightened, but everybody was on alert to see if the quake would get any worse...

We had no damage of any kind in our building, but at that moment we had no idea where the quake's epicenter was. Several of us are very familiar with the USGS earthquake web site for California and Nevada (the source for the picture above). Moments after the shock wave hit us, several people had this site up on their screens. Within a minute or two of the shock hitting us, the initial reports for the quake came in, and the site showed the location and preliminary intensity – quite impressive. Not so many years ago, we'd have had to wait days to get this information, and it wouldn't have been nearly as accurate. For me personally, the news was very comforting: the quake's epicenter was far away from my home. I found out later that Debbie (who was within a few miles of our house when the quake hit) never felt a thing...