Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum |
Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum |
Jul 29 2008, 11:23 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 813 Joined: 29-December 05 From: NE Oh, USA Member No.: 627 |
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! |
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Jul 30 2008, 04:28 PM
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#2
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
Wow, Dan, that's a harrowing story. I wasn't here for the Northridge quake, but the stories I've heard from friends and relations all have that common theme of babies. My babysitter and her 6-month-old son were staying at a pregnant friend's apartment in the west valley; her son missed being crushed by a falling piece of furniture by two inches, she said, and after it was over they couldn't get the door to their apartment open -- they had to yell for help to get out a window. My nephew was born on the night of the earthquake, far away in Dallas, but my in-laws, who live in Valenica, didn't find out they were grandparents until two days later, becuase it was impossible to get in touch. They had had a dinner party the night before, and all of their English china had been carefully washed and left on the dining table to dry. No more china. No more chimney, either, but at least my in-laws were themselves unharmed.
Yesterday's quake wasn't a biggie. As long as they're not too big, they're more fascinating than terrifying (though this one did have me running for the closet). I distinctly felt the three different types of earthquake waves -- the first rapid sharp vibration of the P waves, the larger-amplitude rocking and rolling of the S waves, and then the ocean-swell-like Rayleigh waves petering off at the end. Some readers have pointed out that the fact that the shaking lasted so long and that I felt those three different phases should have told me that the quake wasn't very close to me -- if I'd been closer they would have piled on top of each other, but at 50 miles away their different speeds had caused them to spread out in time by the time they got to me. My babysitter told me that they were watching TV, and Anahita looked up at her at the first shaking, then when it got heavier she stood up and grabbed her blanket and stared at the babysitter as if to say "what the heck is going on?" They were sufficiently far from any topply furniture so the babysitter figured they were safest where they were unless things got really violent. My tornado story is: throughout the time I lived in Fort Worth, Texas, there were only warnings, no funnels anywhere close. Then, in 2000, I was visiting Fort Worth to scope out a site for my wedding. I'd visited several locations including one downtown. I was in a bar in Dallas with some friends when someone said, "hey, on TV they're saying there was a tornado in Fort Worth." It had ripped right across the west side of downtown -- it just barely missed hitting the museum district, plowed into a 7-story office building (the headquarters of the Cash America pawn shop chain), blasted off all its glass and sucked out all the contents of the offices (it was one of those open-floor-plan office buildings, with offices made with cubicle partitions), which dispersed the funnel just a bit so it leapt over a few more things, then it ran straight into one of the tallest buildings downtown, a 30-story glass-walled skyscraper with a restaurant at the top. It destroyed most of the windows in that too and did a lot of other major damage downtown, but the BankOne building seemed to have robbed it of most of its strength. Amazingly, only two people were killed. The site I had favored for my wedding was half a block away from the BankOne building. I called them the next morning and they said they'd not had any significant damage. I figured if they could survive a tornado they could survive my wedding, so I put the deposit down that day! The BankOne building was condemned for a while, with plywood covering its facade for more than a year, but someone eventually bought it and it's recently been renovated and turned into condos. The Cash America building was also, amazingly, renovated. The funniest news I heard after the tornado was that the FBI had had a local office on one floor of the Cash America building. So the morning after the earthquake there were several city blocks around the Cash America building that were crawling with people wearing "FBI" baseball caps, picking up wet pieces of paper on the ground, examining them to see if they were sensitive material, and either dropping them or putting them into shoulderbags. Here's some pictures. Here's more pictures and a series of hilarious updates on the slow pace of the renovation of the BankOne building. --Emily -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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