English German
  Edition # 2  
San Francisco, 03-17-1997

Earthquakes

03/1997
Angelika On Monday, we experienced our first earthquake. Actually, there were even two of them with a rating of 3.6 on the scale. Anyways, Michael and I were comfortably sitting on our futon-couch at 10:30 pm, when I thought I noticed that our couch was moving. Since you consider any small vibration (often caused by trucks passing by) to be an earthquake if you live in San Francisco, Michael and I had to discuss first what it really was. Michael insisted it was the wind. He couldn’t explain to me though why it should move our couch because the windows were closed and it was a windless day in spring.

When I had barely said those words the second earthquake started. This time, even Michael was convinced that it was an earthquake. He went to his notebook without saying a word to find out about the magnitude of this earthquake. You can easily get this information instantly on the Internet. Even the movie they were showing on TV was interrupted. As usual, they interviewed a person living in San Francisco who had witnessed the big earthquake of 1989. That person smartly explained that in San Francisco, you never know if a small earthquake leads to a bigger one. I wanted to shut his mouth so badly, since I was already frightened to death. The earthquake indeed wasn’t so bad and not a single thing broke, but the feeling that the ground is moving and might even split open, has squelched my desire for adventures for years to come.
Figure [1]: The current Californian earthquake map in the internet: http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs

You can imagine for sure that Michael found it all very exciting and adventurous. His comment on the issue was that he had never experienced an earthquake before and this was consequently a unique opportunity to him. I slept badly all night always feeling as if I was falling into a bottomless hole in the ground.

So what do you do the following day after an earthquake? You thoroughly watch any vibrancy, any movement, any shaking. For the umpteenth time you think about the safest place in the apartment and that we bought a dining table that even can be pulled out to give space underneath to potential guests. You really wonder if it was that clever to put all these pictures on the wall and give grace to yourself that you finally didn’t put the picture with the heavy frame above your bed. You wonder if the TV really is on a safe place on that shelf. You curse the overground electricity cables that might hit you severely at the next earthquake. Further more you question yourself if you shouldn’t take an earthquake survival class and if statistics on earthquakes are trustworthy. To sum up, I’m totally fed up with earthquakes and I truly can go on without another one.

Thanks to Boris Kleinbach, kleinbach@ymail.com for translating the original German text to English.

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