I was at a meeting at church tonight when suddenly someone’s cell phone rang. They weren’t expecting a call, so they shrugged and ignored it. It rang again…we all shrugged. Then, not two minutes later, MY cellphone rang. I answered it, thinking all this cell activity was weird enough to merit answering the call…and it was Tony, my husband. “There’s been a 7.4 off the coast of Northern California and we’re under tsunami watch. If it hits down here, it will reach the Central Coast in about 20 minutes. Get out of there NOW.” I’ve never seen a church meeting adjourn so fast in my life (while I live up in the mountains, the church is at sea level, about five blocks off the ocean, in the flood plain of the San Lorenzo River. The river levees will handle ordinary winter surges, but not a tsunami). He called back about five minutes later to tell me that the warning had been canceled, but by that time we were all in our cars and headed for high ground.
I can’t wait to read the minutes of THAT meeting!
I need a good, stiff drink. Even though the warning was canceled, I must say, I breathed a sigh of relief when I turned onto Graham Hill Road and started heading up into the mountains!
I guess the call “Surfs Up!” isn’t appropriate Eh!
Heard it on the news this morning, happy to here that everyone is okay and the Tsunami warning system is working well.
Still, it is a scary way to live, having it in the back of your mind that your life can go from zero to a hundred miles an hour in seconds, never knowing when the light is going to change.
Don’t know about Lunnon Cran, but Lincoln Cathedral was once destroyed by an earthquake. They’ve got it shown in the stained glass windows of the Chapter House. (If you go to see The Da Vinci Code movie you can look for them in the background. They’re filming part of it in there.)
There are actually very few places in the world that haven’t felt an earthquake at some point in their history, though obviously the risk is considerably higher along the Pacific rim. We’re pretty much used to the whole “earth shaking” idea here, but tsunamis are another story. I only remember one tsunami warning other than this one, when I lived in Pacific Grove about 15 years ago, and I remember surfers actually going down to the beach hoping to catch the wave! Nothing like that happened here this time…everyone has the tragedy in Southeast Asia in December too firmly fixed in their minds to do something that stupid.
I understand they actually started evacuating the areas of highest risk (up toward the Oregon border) before the stand-down order came. We’re considerably south of the epicenter, so we just got the EBS warning, but it was strong enough to prompt my husband to call us at the church.
I haven’t checked the news this morning to see if there have been any aftershocks. There’s been nothing we could feel, but then, we didn’t feel the first one.
That earthquake occurred in what is called the Comptche Shelf, I think. It has the greatest capacity for tsunami generation in this part of the Pacific even though it didn’t happen this time.
It seemed like a lot of fuss to me, but considering that its summer and many people might be along the beach, I guess it was the right thing to do. Not that anybody is watching teevee or listening to the radio while on the beach.
Somebody told me about a huge piece of rock that is on an island off the coast of Africa and when it eventually falls, it could create a tsunami-type wave that would wipe out the US’ eastern seaboard, from Maine to Florida. I forgot the name of it, though.
Several hundred campers at Cannon Beach were evacuated around sundown. Imagine driving up to safer ground, then coming back to the beach to try and sleep for the rest of the night. I read that a bridge was wiped out at Cannon Beach by a tsunami in 1964. Some campers might have been thinking about that.
One of the reasons they issued the evac order is they didn’t know at first if it was a slip-strike quake or one of those that can drop the seabed, which can generate a tsunami fairly quickly. They have sirens in the Crescent City/Eureka area, and I hear they were blowing for a good 40 minutes, while police went around to the beach areas and hotels and ordered everybody to evacuate. We don’t have sirens here because most of the earthquake activity along the central coast is generated inland, along the good old San Andreas and its tribs.
When the TV announcement came, they first said that the quake was centered off the coast of San Francisco, which is why my husband panicked. You know how most of Santa Cruz lies right at sea level, along the banks of the river…definitely not the best place to be in that kind of situation. By the time he’d gotten onto USGS and seen the actual location (which was about when the stand-down order came), he’d already warned us.
They had a representative from the US Geological Service on the radio shortly after it happened - he was saying that although a tsunami from a 7.0 wasn’t too likely (and probably wouldn’t be too big if one did happen) they didn’t have enough data to rule it out and felt “better safe than sorry”.
I was relieved to hear that - I have cousins living in Crescent City that I was worried about. And though this wasn’t a giant (the quake that generated the December tsunami had ~200 times the energy) it was still a pretty good shaker - roughly the size of Loma Prieta quake of '89 that collapsed a good part of the high-rise freeway in Oakland and a couple of sections on the Bay Bridge.
As a California native, it’s easy to get rather blase’ about the routine, small earthquakes. But a really good size one has a way of rattling your complacent attitude.
Not to mention most of downtown Santa Cruz! We still have a couple of gaping holes in the ground from Loma Prieta, which was centered just a short distance from here, in Nisene Marks State Park.
The tsunami warning went right up to Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. If nothing else, the recent disasters have gotten a lot of people up off their keisters about having the advanced emergency warning networks in place and operating.
