Here's a little something from the CalTech Web site. It shows what we all felt quite clearly.
I was in an art department meeting in the seventh floor conference room at The Reporter when the building, which is on rollers, started rolling quite forcefully. A few of the attendees were from the Mid-West and had never experienced a temblor before so, needless to say, they were kind of freaked out.
"What do we do?" several people cried. "Get to the elevator lobby," I replied. It was only 20 feet away and, as I told them, "It's the most solid part of the building." No one seemed to pay any attention. My eye was on the floor-to-ceiling glass brick wall between the conference room and the hall. I decided it was worth it to go into the hall and head toward the elevators, but by the time we started doing so, the shaking had subsided.
Steve was at work making copies. He didn't seem too disturbed by the quake, and his only comment to me was he hoped it wouldn't screw up the copier.
Nothing at home fell and broke, except Steve reported a yard stick in the closet fell over and I noticed a pewter eagle had tipped over on a shelf in the bedroom. Not bad for a 5.4. But then, we're about 30 miles from the epicenter.
The unsettling part is the seismologists on the news this evening said it would take an earthquake 10,000 times the size of this one to relieve the stress along the San Andreas fault. If I do my math correctly, that would be about a 8.9 or so (about the size of the one that hit Anchorage back in the '60s). So the big one it was not.
Secretly, I wished it had been a 5.5; not because I wanted more destruction, but because it would have been cool to have a 5.5 on my 55th birthday.
Yeah, it's my birthday today. Thank you, God, for the fun present.
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