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Ignoring the Monster - How to Survive in EarthquakeLand
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5684 Reads
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 If you live here long enough, you'll feel a little one, and worry about The Big One. Some part of my brain still cringes from the day in 1994 when my bed in Sherman Oaks threw me on the floor, the fridge barfed up a stew of food and broken glass, and half the houses in the neighborhood fell to pieces.
afsheen poses today's LA Insight questions about earthquakes over at LABlogs. My answers follow:1) What sort of earthquake preparations do most people have?
2) Have you ever lived though a big quake?
3) Which ones?
4) Does anybody really have earthquake insurance?
5) Do you?
6) How bad would things have to get for my apartment to come crashing into the ground?
7) If I don't anchor the bookcases to the wall, are they really going to fall over and kill me in my sleep?
8) Are you fearful, anticipating, or indifferent to coming quakes?
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1) I think most Angelenos live, either blissfully or nervously, in denial. Some may have a nice, sealed Rubbermaid trashcan full of MREs, drinking water, flashlight batteries and first-aid supplies, but I think most - like me - have a few gallons of water in the garage, a few bandaids in the glove box, and the naive belief that we'll always be able to crawl through the wreckage to where the canned food and matches are. We get little shakes most of the time, after which everyone sort of unhunches their shoulders, chuckles, and shrugs off the vision of a catastrophic quake flattening the entire city.
2) Oh, yeah.
3) I lived about five miles from the epicenter of the Northridge quake on 1/17/04. With a hideous, rattling roar, the furniture was dancing all over the room when I woke up. I stubbed my toes on the jitterbugging antique dresser and screamed like a woman. When the shaking stopped, my then-fiancee (a Pasadena native) said to me, "There will be aftershocks, and they're pretty serious, and even after they stop, people are going to be talking about this for two or three months. Nobody's going to talk about much else."
We were pretty lucky - our place stayed in one piece, but houses three doors away were completely thrashed, and later red-tagged. The lines of force put out by the quake in my neighborhood were almost geometric - you'd have two houses untouched, then three totaled, five more unscathed, four destroyed. It was really odd.
I jumped in my car - I was covering Simi Valley for the Times back then - and headed up to work, realizing too late that I had about an ounce of gas in my tank and none of the stations was pumping gas due to the power failure. But I had to keep moving so I could report on the damage in Ventura County - Simi was a complete disaster area, as was Fillmore. I finally wound up cadging a coupla gallons of gas from - and I'm embarrassed to say this - Congressman Elton Gallegly, who personally sucked it out of the tank of his antique fire engine with his own mustachioed lips. True story.
4) I believe all California homeowners with mortgages are required to get earthquake insurance.
5) Hell yes.
6) A good 6.5 anywhere within five miles of you could do it, but earthquakes are tricky - it all depends on the duration, depth, severity and location of the quake, the condition of your apartment building and the earth underneath it - a lot of variables. You can get a good earthquake kit together, you can live paranoid, but you simply cannot prepare any more than that. Besides, you might not even be at home when it happens - and it will happen.
7)Yes. Do it. It'll take just a few minutes. Also look into getting some earthquake putty to keep your fine breakables from, well, breaking. Oh, and don't hang anything over your bed that you wouldn't want to hit you in the head.
8) I repeat. I am in almost complete denial. No earthquakes will hurt me or my family or house. La la la la la. Okay, part of me's scared shitless, and I think I should probably quit blogging and go stock up the old earthquake kit.
Past Insights:
L.A. Music - How I Shred My Ears
How to ESCAPE FROM L.A.
Surviving the freeways
How do you beat the heat?
Where are you? Why are you there?
Where to eat in Los Angeles.
What are you doing and why are you here?
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Friday, October 22, 2004 - 11:00 AM
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