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Earthquake

By clock on July 22, 2007.

Well, if one stays in San Francisco for a month, it is bound to happen one day...

On Friday early morning (just before 5am) I woke up to an earthquake.

I've been through a bunch of earthquakes before - Balkans are on some kind of fault, I understand. I slept through a pretty strong one (7 Richter, I believe) while staying at a hotel on top of the mountain that was right above the epicenter. Not just that the quake did not wake me up, but even banging on the door by my friends was ineffective - hard work and mountain air conspired.

But what woke me up on Friday, I think, was not so much the shaking, but the sound. I have never actually HEARD an earthquake before: they would start slowly and it would take a few seconds to realize that the ground is moving. But this one started with a loud CRAAACK sound, which someone later at the office aptly described as the sound of a piano falling through the roof of the next-door apartment.

The epicenter was across the bay, in Oakland, but I surely felt it here. Anyway, it was quite brief in duration. I thought there was nothing I could do about it - I was OK, the house around me appeared OK, so there was nothing for me to do except turn around and immediately fall asleep again.

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Ah, you locals can be so blase about it ;-)

That is a cool link, though!

Epicenter: earthquake in Bogutovac, my Dad was outside fixing the car for a neighbor (fica), and he heard noise he describe as if the jet was landing next to him, and the land "vanished" beneath him... coming back very fast in opposite direction... I was in the house and all I could feel was like being in a giant baby rattle - unable to move while the roof tiles were falling making crashing sound, and the wall cracked as well. All other earthquakes were rocking, this one was up n down "jumping". But worth of experience, no doubt!

1999: being used to shaking of the ground caused by bombs, one morning, just after NATO resigned for a day after "good ol' night action", 5 AM, shaking woke me up. But something was weird: there was no familiar glass sound to escort it. After a minute or two, I realized it's "only" an earthquake and didn't even bother to wake up properly - just turned on the other side and fall asleep.

Hmmmm... Pavlov would have blast if he was there...

Having experienced dozens of silent earthquakes in the Pacific NW, I had my doubts about there being sound attached to any of them. Here in Western Norway we get about one per decade and I heard one of them! It sounded like a freight train going by on the front lawn, very close -- but it felt like any garden-variety earthquake.