Halloween’s today but the scare was last night
We had an earthquake last night — 5.6 on the Richter scale, centered 6 miles away or so. I was upstairs finishing Sammie’s bath and when I noticed the walls shaking (visibly swaying) and I froze for a couple of seconds before I realized what was going on. Sammie looked at me with this wide-eyed stare and she was clearly terrified. Like an idiot I grabbed her out of the tub, by this time things had stopped shaking, and ran downstairs to see Huong standing in the bathroom doorway. It must have been less than 10 seconds, but the first thoughts in my head were “I have to get Sammie out of here” and “where’s Huong and our emergency packs?” It wasn’t instinctive to hunker down under a table or in a door jamb (I grew up in tornado country, where you go into the bathtub or run into the basement), so my thoughts were to get our supplies and get outside.
It was pretty terrifying, the largest earthquake I’ve personally witnessed. The ironic part was that we’d gone to the museum just the other day to see Body Worlds, and they have an earthquake simulator. We got on it and simulated the recent India earthquake (7 point something on the Richter scale) and it was all fun — ha, ha, that was scary, chuckle. It’s a little different when it catches you by surprise. However a 5.6 isn’t so bad – we had some things fall off the shelves, and we had a small piece of plaster fall from one of corners, but nothing serious. If we weren’t on an upper story, probably nothing would have happened.
So this was really more of a wake up call than anything else, and it prompted me to double check what the Red Cross has to say about disaster preparedness. And it set me to thinking about what’s important. I really didn’t give a second thought to our pets. Sorry to say that if the big one hits, they’re on their own. We’ve joked that one of us would take a cat under each arm and the other would get Sammie and the dog, but if last night was an indication, that’ll be an afterthought. And the same goes for our belongings; just family and our emergency backpacks. I can live with those priorities.