Why I didn’t drive to Andy’s Orchard today (in retrospect, not that I could have known it at the time.) I would have been driving right past the spot with my tires all bouncing around on a crowded part of the freeway. I somehow decided this morning that, nah, I’ll go Thursday or Friday.
And then the conversation went something like this, as my husband came around the corner:
Did you feel it?
Feel what?
Yeah, I didn’t either.
What? How did we miss it?
Turns out he’d been talking to someone in south San Jose when the 5.1 hit, nice and shallow and close at four miles deep. (Note that he was also on the phone with someone in San Jose when the Loma Prieta hit in ’89 and before the shock waves made it to here, got up and stood in the doorway of his office to prepare for it. Suddenly he heard a colleague down the hall yelling his name, he being the biggest guy on the second floor: Hey! Quit jumping up and down!
Oh wait…
Today’s means, the USGS warns, that there’s a high chance of aftershocks in the next 24 hours. And if we get something stronger then they’ll change the classification to a foreshock. This was on the Calaveras line, which connects to the Hayward fault, which is problematical because in the post-War boom of the 1950’s the fault line was the cheap land and they simply bulldozed it and developed it. Every single hospital on that side of the Bay is within yards of where the earth wants to spit and split.
This is why California decreed in 1994 that by 2020 every hospital in the state had to be seismically able to stay standing in a bigger quake than we’ve ever had. And by 2030 any acute-care facility has to not only be standing but still functional.
We have a friend who was operating on a patient at the VA when the Loma Prieta hit and his unconscious patient was suddenly trying to shoot across the room while all medical personel present grabbed at the guy and held on.
Fun times.
So. What do you do when you have an actual timestamp on that particular possibility? Where the power and even the water could get disrupted, even on this side of the Bay?
You quick run and go do all the laundry so that at least you’ll have clean clothes for as long as possible.
And you don’t wait till evening to hit post on this.