Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum Options

[belleraphon1]

Sincerely hope all you UMSFers on the West Coast are OK! Read Emily's blog....
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001576/

Widfires and now an earthquake... scary...

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Craig

p.s. With global climate change this forum may get a few posts or two in this century!

[Greg Hullender]

I was on the 14th floor of the Metro Tower in Foster City, CA during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989. I was in an interior hallway, so when the lights went out, I was in darkness. The building was swaying so much that it kept tossing me against either side of the hallway -- while making the kind of noise a subway train does when it comes into a station. I remember thinking "this is what it feels like the moment before you die."

The shaking stopped. The emergency lights came on. We scrambled down the stairs to the exits, where guards were telling us "run away from the building -- glass may be falling." So we paired up at the exits and sprinted away, like students in some fraternity initiation event. From the middle of a grassy plaza a hundred yards away, I turned and looked back to see the Tower was completely unscathed. It didn't even lose a window.

But the brick walkway around it was jumbled in places. Apparently when the shock wave rippled through, some of the bricks didn't come back down quite where they went up.

It was a long walk home.

--Greg