EARTHQUAKE PALOOZA WATCH 2024
I was in one room, my lovely bride in the adjoining room, and there was a rumble and a rattle. I thought, at first, that a particularly noisy garbage truck had gone down the road to fast. Or maybe a helicopter was on low pass maneuvers. Maybe the helicopter ambulance service.
To the USGS!
The steady hands in the Office of the Department of Shake Studies say it was a 4.8 temblor. This, of course, was too close to the media center of the world, and so with in a matter of minutes and hours texts and calls filtered in from the family and friends, earthquake experts and structural engineers, all.
I had dutifully walked the grounds and nothing was amiss. Except for this woeful damage.
This was my first earthquake. It is possible I’ve slept through some small ones — if they could be felt where I was at that time, that is. And I’ve been in some stadiums that erupted to the point of registering on seismographs. But this was a true parts of the earth rubbing against one another first for me.
Turns out, on this side of the country, you can feel them over greater distance. Has something to do with the soil and stone composition, I’d imagine. And we don’t even know where all of the faults are in this area. Indeed, we don’t know the precise location of the one we felt this morning, which is said to be the biggest one in this region in the history of the country.
Late in the day, we felt, barely, a 3.7 aftershock. I’d thought I’d imagined it … until The Yankee asked me if I felt it too.
So that’s two for me. Earthquakes are old hat now, and we can return back to normal sunny days with the occasional storm cloud rolling by, please and thank you.
The camellia did not seemed bothered by the rumbling of the earth beneath it.
That’s a credit, I am sure, to the big, strong root system. Not too deep, not too shallow, just right.
And also the soil they are planted in. This guy is rooted firmly in the sandy mix, here, on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet.
Things are really starting to grow around here. Now … if we can only start the process earlier in the spring.
Since we’re talking about beautiful weather and beautiful places and earthquakes, let’s have a look at a few more videos from our trip to California last month.
This is just a randoms spot where you could pull off on the Pacific Coast Highway. Just a view, unique in its ubiquity, glorious in their splendor, outstanding in their anonymity. Nothing in the world has ever happened here, except for people that stop, look down and marvel at the size of it all, the beauty of it all, and just how simultaneously timeless and ephemeral it all is.
That’s a lot to put on waves, maybe, but the waves are used to it. I stood on this beach for a long time wondering how long it takes to grind the big rocks into little pebbles, and how long before those little pebbles become sand and dust. In that light, the waves are not impressed by our meager notions of time or our literature.
Mehmet Murat ildan wrote, “The greatest pleasure of the wave is to bring the stones to the beach and then try to get them back into the sea! Everyone and everything has a toy to play with!”
And that’s true.
But waves take as much as they give. It’s a good thing they give us a lot. One is mindless, and the other we think of as a kind benefactor. How interesting that we assign conflicting personas to the opposite sides of the same wave.
No, the waves, the oceans, they are not impressed by our meager notions of time or our literature. Or our silly notions of time. Slow motion, regular speed, the few hours I spent on that beach, the thousands and millions of years some of those great big rocks have been worn down, it all means nothing to the waves. It’s mindless, yet patient. It’s off-putting, but liberating.
