Six days ago there was an earthquake in the Greater Los Angeles area that has come to be known as “The 2008 Chino Hills Earthquake.” That’s a filthy mouthful of a name for a natural disaster that didn’t actually cause any damage, but the collective feeling of self-importance runs high in the desert. I’ve neglected writing about this because frankly there’s been nothing much worth noting. However, I did discover—thanks to a gigantic wiki entry on the subject—that there is a 5 percent chance this most recent quake will be followed be something quite a few orders of magnitude larger.
I think most Angelenos are playing the odds on this one—and so am I.
Living in an earthquake zone is risky business. The field of plate tectonics is still at an incipient stage, and forecasting earthquakes with any sort of accuracy remains an impossibility. It is also impossible for scientists to guess the size of an earthquake, time of the strike notwithstanding. That means that every one of us living on this fault zone is playing a game of chance with geologic time. Chances of course being that none of us will ever see ourselves disappear in a devastating conflagration of glass, concrete and blazing automobiles.
When living in a fault zone, however, it’s sometimes hard to dismiss the nagging question that calls to you (always at the most inappropriate time): “What if an earthquake struck now?” It’s traditional to imagine being trapped in a subway or hermetically sealed in an elevator, but there are other more awful positions one could potentially be caught in: struggling to balance a cookie sheet pulled fresh out the oven; on the top rung of the ladder, stretching that final inch to paint the gutter; or underneath a car, changing the oil. With the right amount of quaking and shaking, any activity could become fatal.
I think that deaths from meetings between earthquakes and compromising situations are the most common type of quake-related fatality. These unfortunate accidents are surely more numerous than cases where falling debris crushes someone or when a building implodes, consuming those within. I have a feeling that most earthquake injuries are highly unglamorous.
Which is a scary thought, because once you concede the fact that an earthquake could present itself at any time and at any magnitude, it follows that it could happen, when—as they say—you least expect it. So I’ve come to walk around expecting earthquakes.
When I’m stepping off the bus. When I’m at the urinal. When I’m sitting on the fire escape staring off at skyscrapers. I’m often—but definitely not always—expecting an earthquake. So when an earthquake event actually occurs, I’m rarely surprised. The 2008 Chino Hills earthquake, however, came out of nowhere.
I was on the phone with Megan. She was located at our posh, K-Town digs and I was at work ten miles west in Santa Monica. Our pleasant late-morning chat was cut short when Megan broke off mid-sentence: “Ohmygod! Is that an earthquake?” No less than 5 seconds later I was feeling the ground move up and down as she screamed hysterically into my ear.
During an earthquake thoughts flow from panic into fear and finally awe. Just as I began to wonder how much worse it was going to get, everything stopped. Like all earthquakes, it ended just as startlingly as it had begun. It was as almost as if there had never been an earthquake. I struggled with my short-term memory to maintain a grip on what had just happened, to pull in something tangible, but it all fluttered away.
Megan was still on the phone, still in some state of panic. She took a shower to calm down but was tormented with aftershocks that rattled the tub playfully.
In Los Angeles, earthquakes are always somewhere on the mind. There’s no getting around the fact that under this city lie a series of doomsday faults that could at any moment explode with inexorable fury. It’s terribly fascinating that people—myself included—choose to make our homes on the Pacific Rim. At least I’ll be out of Los Angeles by September: I would prefer to weather an extinction-level event in the halcyon environs of Monterey County than try and endure in this crowded, festering metropolis. I have no doubt that denizens here would eat the stragglers alive. Here's hoping that the 2008 Chino Hills earthquake wasn't the canary in our coal mine!
brett at 02:23 AM on August 05, 2008 | Permalink
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