Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Whole lotta' nothing going on

Hey, guess what? Southern California just had an earthquake!

I was standing at the gym looking at the television screen (anything to avoid doing actual gym stuff) when the CNN screen is showing all these panorama shots of LA from the top of their building at Sunset and Cahuenga. The closed captioning is reading something like, "no damage to be seen from this viewpoint, so smoke, no sirens can be heard. But Los Angeles has just suffered a major earthquake." At this point pretty much the entire gym is standing there staring at the screen and we all exchange looks, "When?" Apparently recently. "Where" Uh, just East of here in Chino Hills. "Huh." And then we all go back to working out while glancing at the TV.

The facts from the AP:
The quake struck at 11:42 a.m. PDT. The U.S. Geological Survey estimate the quake at magnitude 5.8 but was revised downward to a 5.4, centered 29 miles East-Southeast of downtown Los Angeles near Chino Hills in San Bernadino County. More than a dozen aftershocks quickly followed, the largest estimated a magnitude 3.8.

I rode my bike home and as I am walking in the door the phone is ringing already. It's Lyle, "Is everything okay?"
Seems fine.
"Anything broken?"
I don't know. I just got home.

So as I walk the house straining to find ANYTHING fallen or askew, Lyle fills me in on how the earthquake felt at his work which is further away from the epicenter than our house . He tells me that there were two big shakes and that by the second one most of the people at work had run outside to the parking lot. He also said that the two first big ones were followed by possibly ten aftershocks that he noticeably felt.

By this time I'd completed my tour of the house and was (not at all) disappointed to find everything exactly the way I left it. And I promise you this house is filled with opportunities to crash and go crooked. Blissfully our house is untouched. And I can't figure out what the hell I was doing at the gym that I wouldn't' feel the building go boom. I swear, I don't work out that hard.
Feel free to click on the photo to see a larger version of map. On the far left in green, Lyle at work. Near the center but still to the right, in red, me on my bike. In blue way over on the right, the epicenter.

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