This morning I woke up to my house shaking and my bed jerking forward then slamming into the wall. Downstairs my painting fell off the mantle and I heard it hit the floor. I got dressed and ran downstairs, checked on mom, USGS hadn’t updated yet and my only confirmations of an earthquake were from Twitter. It didn’t feel like the worst earthquake ever, even though it’s only the second one I’ve ever felt, but I was asleep when it started and due to being in bed assumed I might not have been able to properly gauge it. I made mom get up and get dressed. The earthquake isn’t the scariest part of this, it’s the tsunami if ones going to come.
I know the history of the 1700 quake and the “orphan tsunami” that hit Japan 12 hours later. There are accounts from indigenous people on both continents, there are geological records and ghost forests in the soil. There’s the Cascadian subduction zone, the Seattle fault going through Bainbridge and Sodo, and the Whidbey fault diagonally slicing through the area. These faults aren’t well known, we don’t know how long they are and geologists are still trenching through eastern Washington trying to verify how far they go.
I’ve been concerned since I moved here knowing the area was overdue. An exercise Washington state ran (with some local government from Canada joining in.. not sure if it was just B.C.) originally recommended being prepared for 3 days on your own in an emergency and then revised it to two weeks. Two weeks. If this area is damaged that bad I expect it to be from “the big one” and the entire area would be under water because it’s all so low. Puget sound can surge, it can have a tsunami, and there have been models expecting damage anywhere from destroying everything west of i5, to anything west of the Cascades. We’re all in that, there’s no good escape route other than going east, and it’s really hopeless because road conditions will be bad and if a tsunami from North America was able to hit Japan in 12 hours, it’ll be on our coast within minutes. And this place isn’t on a grid because of all the hills and it takes half an hour to go 10 miles, everything’s stacked against us here. I hate it, it gives me so much anxiety.
I’ve been paying attention to the earthquakes in Ridgecrest being felt all over the Southwest, friend’s in Vegas, Phoenix, and LA have confirmed feeling them. It’s being felt in San Diego. There were two quakes around the size of the one here and 24 hours later a 7.1 hit. The geographical shifts in the desert can be observed from satellite images in space. With that and all of the activity in Alaska in USGS, I knew our faults were the last to go, and this morning I knew exactly what was happening. I was validated and terrified. I’m less than 2 miles from the water. There’s no high ground to get to and your best bet is leaving town through the 90 and into the mountains, it takes too long to get there.
I couldn’t get back to sleep and emailed the office I was taking a sick day. I napped a little. I’m thinking of moving a first aid kit to the trunk and I need to review my bug-out bag. It’s impossible to know if this morning was the big quake in the series or if it’s a foreshock before the main event. There have been aftershocks in my area and the next 48 hours are worrisome, but we never really know when these things will happen. Beyond the threat of structural damage earthquakes aren’t that scary. I’m scared of the water.