We were at Lowes, buying some casing for a new front entryway that I installed last weekend, and you could feel the entire concrete slab that the store was on start to gently roll. It went on for many seconds, and equipment hanging overhead was gently swaying. I told Patricia, “That’s a big quake, somewhere, many miles away.” When we got to the car, and turned on the radio, we heard that it was down in Baja, probably about 180 miles or so southeast of us. They got a lot bigger jolt down in San Diego and the other border towns, I’m sure. I haven’t exinspected the house here for damage, but I’d be surprised if there was any.
[Update a while later]
For those interested, it was at the Lowes in Hawthorne, at the end of the runway of the airport. And SpaceX is right across the street (Crenshaw) from it.
As long as the Colorado River isn’t flowing backwards…
Lowes and Home depot are the last place I’d want to be in a quake. The stacks of heavy stuff perched overhead is just waiting for a big one to come down.
We haven’t had a quake worth the name for years in SoCal, now Rand moves back and we’ve had two in the last few months. Using the AGW cautionary principle, we should take up a fund to move Rand to Colorado or someplace.
@McGehee
Last I heard, there wasn’t enough water in the Colorado River to flow at all, by the time you get to Baja.
Unless our Imperial Masters have managed to shut down more of the economy of the American Southwest like they did in California.
Is expecting the house the opposite of inspecting the house?
The stacks of heavy stuff perched overhead is just waiting for a big one to come down.
The particular aisle we were in was nothing but long vertical sticks of molding. It was about as safe an aisle that probably exists in the store.
It was Bush’s Fault.
Yeah, because, ’cause… Um, since Bush didn’t sign Kyoto, there was global warming, which killed a lot of polar bears by dropping out of the sky and going SPLAT, and all the bear hair clogged up the el Nino river so California didn’t get any water, which made everything lighter, and the weight of the dead bear carcasses tilted the North American Plate just like the Marines will cause Guam to capsize, and there was an earthquake in Lowes, California.
…And right now Bush is laughing at the superior intellect…
P.S. Forgot: glad to hear yer ok, Rand!
There have been a lot of earthquakes the last year or so. I mean they are all over the map. It used to be there was like one big earthquake or two a year worldwide I could remember of (e.g. Kobe, Indonesian Tsunami). Now it was like Chile, Haiti, Turkey, Taiwan, and a couple of others (e.g. Italy, or these at California) in a short succession. Most of these places are pretty earthquake prone to begin with, but still…
I read a paper, linked from a Wikipedia article, titled “Poseidon’s Horses: Plate Tectonics and Earthquake Storms in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean” some time ago. In it the author claims the Bronze Age collapse was influenced by a catastrophic series of earthquakes which disturbed the highly centralized economies of the era, leading to starvation, invasions and the ilk. Food for though for sure.
I told my aunt we were having an earthquake. I felt it here in Phx, AZ. Very mild. In all the years I lived in CA I never felt an earthquake. I slept through them all and had people tell me about it later. The only big one I experienced was when the company I worked for moved from CA to Silverdale, WA. All our employees being from CA were standing around giving estimates of magnitude while the building rolled like jello.
Today’s xkcd comic seems relevant to this thread.
I was assuming the flow would be saltwater rather than fresh.
So, of course, xkcd had this to say today: http://xkcd.com/723/ 😉
Rand,
What is interesting is how soon things are getting back to normal in Mexico, versus Haiti, even though the quake was bigger then the one which struck Haiti.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/us/06quake.html?hp
April 5, 2010
In Mexico, Resuming Life After the Quake
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
[[[A visitor dropped unexpectedly into this city, which seemed to sustain the most damage in the area, might be surprised to hear that a magnitude 7.2 quake had rumbled through the day before, causing two deaths and scores of mostly minor injuries and damaging several buildings. ]]]
What is interesting is how soon things are getting back to normal in Mexico, versus Haiti, even though the quake was bigger then the one which struck Haiti.
The one that struck Haiti hit almost directly under Port-au-Prince, while the epicenter for yesterday’s was mostly empty desert. And even Mexico has much better enforced building codes than Haiti.
I felt the earth move, under my feet….
Had the same reaction you did Rand, here in OC. Group of us, at friends house, doing the Easter Egg Hunt thing for the kids. We all kind of looked at each other wondering who would be the first to run. Went on for an unusual amount of time, long wave frequency, guessed it was a big one far away.
Also, it’s been upwards of 200 freaking years since the last major earthquake hit Haiti. So there was no institutional memory when buildings where constructed, codes were devised, etc. etc.