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dmkid:) wrote:Haha I was brushing my teeth when it happened and my brother kept screaming at me to go outside but I was like psh let me finish

It wasnt scary at all because, honestly, I've been in much worser earthquakes but yeah it's all good

You're not old enough to have been in much "worser" earthquakes unless you experienced them in an area outside of southern California.

tooweird wrote:haven't had an earthquake in the SF area in awhile...i love earthquakes i whoot and shout when there is one! haha

Maybe your attitude will change when one hits close enough and hard enough for you to experience a loss. Those of us who have lived through a few BIG ones don't usually consider them "fun". We do understand that they are a way of life, but like our almost constant fires we have in this state, we do understand their potential for disaster. We don't live in fear, however we don't love them or cheer them on either. We have come to respect mother nature.

yea well if you lost someone in a natural disaster like an earthquake im sorry for your loss...but im not cheering for friggin 8.9 magnitude earthquakes...this was a measely 5 something...im not gonna have such a grim attitude towards things. it wasn't a giant one...so let me have my fun -.- believe me i'd be cowering in a 8 magnitude...i didn't even feel this one

and besides....i know what earthquakes are and that if there is one...what im getting into...i live right next to the fault line...it's right outside my window...the san adreas that runs out off the cliff of Skyline Dr. in Daly City

Glad I'm prepared for a big one. Got lots of canned food, bottled water, and guns and ammo! I just need a first aid kit. I keep telling my parents to make an emergency kit but they keep procrastinating on making it.

we have a giant stash of candles and food...and water...we're always prepped for the next big one

I've been through both the Landers quake and the Loma Prieta quake; those were the two strongest I've experienced (if even slightly, as was the case with Loma Prieta). And dozens of smaller quakes.

The Landers quake actually shook me out of bed and onto the floor. Or, rather, I woke up in the wee hours on the edge of the bed and was so disoriented by the shaking I half-tumbled off the edge of the bed onto the floor. Don't think I care to experience anything worse than that.

Food for thought: the moment magnitude scale (please do not say "Richter Scale"; scientists retired that scale almost 30 years ago) is a logarithmic progression, so an increase of 1.0 on the scale results in an earthquake 31.6 times more intense, and an increase of 2.0 results in an earthquake 1,000 times more intense.

Food for thought, part II: today's earthquake was 5.4; the Indian Ocean earthquake of 2004 was 9.3, literally several million times stronger.

Food for thought, part III: if you were to take the power released by all of the millions of earthquakes in the past 100 years, the three recorded 9.0+ magnitude earthquakes (Valdivia, Chile in 1960; Anchorage, Alaska in 1964; Indonesia, 2004) would account for nearly 50% of that total.

thank you for those enlightening "food for thoughts" =)

Squirtle wrote:

tooweird wrote:haven't had an earthquake in the SF area in awhile...i love earthquakes i whoot and shout when there is one! haha

there was one a month or two ago, but it was wimpy. =P

There were a few, and they were all about 5 minutes from my sister's house where I'm staying for the summer. Her condo is on top of a garage, and it's a pretty old building, so we felt them pretty hard. They woke me up, that's for sure.

Yeah great on the "food for thought"... now I'm hungry. Thanks Hostrauser.

The Sylmar quake was my first "real" quake (at least the first I remember ever having felt). I was in 7th grade and it shook me out of bed. The movement was not the typical rolling motion we get. This one was a jarring up and down for about 2 minutes. I did not sleep for weeks after that and whenever there was an aftershock I was sick to my stomach (literally ... I would throw up from the stress.) It would take 15 years to get over my fear and finally sleep longer than 4 hours at a time. How? I took 2 Geology classes in college to understand as much as I could about the faults in SoCal and the mechanics of earthquakes.

The Landers quake was another sleep loser. It hit the day after we filled our new pool. Forget about the house falling down ... my first reaction was "OMG! There goes the plaster on the d**ned pool!" My oldest daughter was 2 1/2; my youngest not even 10 months. When the Big Bear quake hit 2 hours later, the oldest said "House moved! Do it again mom!" At least the kids didn't lose sleep over it. I, on the other hand, was wide awake to make sure they were "safe" and ok for about 3 days.

Although the damage from quakes isn't funny, the reaction of some people is fun to watch sometimes. Working for The Home Depot in Fullerton we had many people who were transplants form Altanta. A small quake hit in the mid 1990's (about a 3.0). Most of the native Californians just yawned -- it didn't even warrant a look up from most of us. One Georgian, however, dove under his desk and refused to come out for at least 1/2 hr. Another ran through the halls toward the front door yelling "Get out! Get out! We're all going to be buried and die!!!" She took the next 3 days off work to calm down. Remembering my own fears back in 1971, it was both funny but not at the same time.

I was driving between coaching Kennedy and Alvarado when it happened. I saw the stop light swaying, then looked at the trees if there was strong winds blowing. It wasn't until I got a text a minute later that I was told that an earthquake just happened.
My first experience was in the Philippines when Mt. Pinatubo erupted and blanketed the country in thick ash.

wow a volcano eruption..that's intense

I lived through the Sylmar (I was FOUR!!!) and it broke my favorite toy drum dang it!! I distinctly remember it to this day, and standing up as the house was rocking and rolling and looking down the hallway at my parent's bedroom and screaming "SUMPTHIN'S HAPPNIN MOMMMMMMM!!" I was pretty scared, but it was temporary.

For the next major quake, I was in the dorms at CSULB that fateful morning when the Whittier Quake hit. Just like FSQ says, it's sort of hilarious to see people's reactions. When the Whittier quake hit, I immediately jumped out of bed, threw open my drapes on my dorm room, and was greeted by seeing my Resident Assistant across the way in her nightgown doing the same thing, but she was SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS!! It was sort of funny--in a sad scary sort of way. My roommate TOTALLY freaked out. That was a very strong earthquake.

The next FOUR earthquakes all centered around my time at Knott's Berry Farm as an esteemed employee there (yeah yeah yeah...we all have to start somewhere...so shut it.) The Sierra Madre quake happened, and that really shook up my mom who was back home in Pasadena by herself when it hit. The Landers quake happened on a day I was supposed to work, and knocked me out of bed at my condo in Placentia. I called in to KBF Security (where I worked) and the guy that was working in dispatch was CLEARLY freaked out, so I got in my clothes and hightailed it to work. While sitting at morning briefing the Big Bear Quake hit. OK OK OK...that's enough! But the coup de grace came in January of 1994, a few months before I would end up leaving. I was working graveyard security, and was just checking an office at the base of the Montezuma's Revenge roller coaster when the Northridge quake hit. I looked up to see Montezuma's rocking back and forth, back and forth, and THAT was a MAJOR quake. Very very scary.

For this Chino Hills quake, I was sitting in an office here in Riverside as I do some fire department consulting work and it was pretty strong. One big shift, a couple of shakes, and then a REALLY big shake, and then lots of rolling. I estimated the quake to have lasted a good strong 30-40 seconds. Ground floor cement foundation, and that quake kept on rolling for awhile. I was not mistaking like "building sway" for the earthquake. It was long.

First call was to my wife in Seattle to tell her I was fine just in case she turned on the news and heard there was a big earthquake. And because at first you don't know where the epicenter is, I figured if it was that strong in Riverside, and the epicenter was like in Los Angeles, than it would be safe to say we had had a MAJOR MAJOR quake. So I called Orange County Fire next to find out if they were ok, and they couldn't talk to me but they said it was busy. But no major damage....

Anyway...that's that. We're all good. Nothing more to see here. And yeah, earthquakes can be an annoyance or even "fun" I guess, but before you start getting to flippant about them, just remember, lots of people die every year in quakes.

Squirtle wrote:

tooweird wrote:haven't had an earthquake in the SF area in awhile...i love earthquakes i whoot and shout when there is one! haha

there was one a month or two ago, but it was wimpy. =P

ahh there was one! honestly...that one was small....i was sitting in my friend's dorm room at Dominican U. and everyone started running around and panicking...especially the kid all the way from Colorado who doesn't experience anything out there.

dmcoach wrote:My first experience was in the Philippines when Mt. Pinatubo erupted and blanketed the country in thick ash.

tooweird wrote:wow a volcano eruption..that's intense

Yeah, there was a 7.8 earthquake in the Philippines in 1990; some scientists think it may have "awoken" Mt. Pinatubo. And get this: Mt. Pinatubo had its climactic eruption on June 15th, 1991, the same day Typhoon Yunya hit the islands.

The 2nd largest volcanic eruption of the 20th Century and a Category 3 hurricane on the same day? Sign me up!

Mt. Pinatubo is actually an interesting story: one of the first accurate predictions of a cataclysmic eruption. The correct prediction allowed tens of thousands of people to be safely evacuated a few days before the mountain went berzerk. Indeed, very few people were killed solely by the eruption or the typhoon: it was the massive lahars that the two natural disasters combined to create that claimed the most lives.

Chaporch wrote:
You're not old enough to have been in much "worser" earthquakes unless you experienced them in an area outside of southern California.

Yeah the ones I expirienced were in El Salvador, and those were 7.6 and 6.9
Which was MUCH worse that a 5.8 one so yeah