General

North Bay Quake

11 Comments

Sounds like they had a pretty good shake up in Napa. apparently the biggest one in the Bay Area since Loma Prieta, a quarter of a century ago. Have an in-law in Vallejo, but she’s currently in Missouri, so we’re more likely to have felt it here in LA than she was. Of course, I’ll get calls from relatives who don’t know how California is, wondering if we’re all right.

11 thoughts on “North Bay Quake”

  1. In Mill Valley we felt it as a very light rolling that went on for quite a while. Much more notable for its duration than severity. Was shocked the following morning to discover it was as big as it was. Having lived in the San Fernando Valley most of my life I was used to far sharper jolts.

  2. I live in the south bay area, about 60-70 air miles from the epicenter. There was a strong initial jolt, followed by maybe 30 seconds of intermittent decreasing rollers. I’m on a hill on solid ground – I suspect people on the alluvial flat areas felt it much more. First news photos I saw from the quake area only included 1) a toppled brick chimney 2) a buckled asphalt road 3) a shop window broken by a clothes dummy that had fallen through it.
    (Gee, that reminds me – I better check my own chimney. It was cracked by the 89 quake and never repaired because my parents were in the process of moving out. But now I live here…)

    1. Seems like it’s no more cracked than before.
      There’s actually an amusing story about that chimney. When I bought the house from the family, I wanted to deal with the chimney. Since I was planning on a remodel, I just wanted to make it safe for maybe 6 months. I figured on taking the top part off, down to the shoulder (the cracks all being above that point). since a contractor was going to have to do the work, I went to the city permits office about it. Long story short – after some discussion, they wryly admitted that there was no way they could formally issue a permit for such a temporary, ad-hoc repair. They informally recommended I do nothing, since it had been that way for at least 20 years, and would probably stay up another 6 months. It’s now about 5 months since I had that conversation 🙂

    2. I’m a light sleeper and never felt a thing! I’m near I-880 & HY-237.
      I first heard about it on the web!

      BD

  3. Great story in the news a long time ago around the time of the LA Northridge quake. TV news interviewed a guy who had been through that quake, and also through a hurricane in Florida. He put it this way: “In Florida, you turn on the news and the guy is telling you ‘In three days you are going to lose all your stuff.’, and then the next day he’s saying ‘in two days you are going to lose all your stuff’… In LA, you just felt the shaking, and looked around to see if you had lost all your stuff. I prefer the LA way.”

    1. I noted that when I moved to Florida almost exactly this time, ten years ago, knowing that as soon as I got there I was going to have to prepare the new house for Frances. I said that hurricanes are much worse than earthquakes, because much of the damage from them comes from wasted effort of days of preparation when you don’t know for sure they’ll hit you, and they generally don’t, whereas earthquakes are come as you are. If we ever develop any facility with predicting them, they’ll become as bad as hurricanes in that regard.

      1. Living through storm season in Tornado Alley is IMHO a lot worse than earthquake-prone SoCal ( although maybe I’ll feel different when the Big One hits :-/). Even in Tornado Alley, actual tornadoes are rare, but straight-line winds strong enough to topple a fence or chimney are not (observed 1-sigma approx 3-4 years – probably a Poisson dist instead of Gaussian though); same goes for hailstorms big enough to ruin your roof, bust a skylight, break a window, beat up a car, etc. One time after a particularly nasty midnight hailstorm, on the way to work next morning I saw cars whizzing along the freeway with both windshield and rear window completely missing. A few days later at the insurance adjuster, there was a brand-new Nissan Z-car completely totaled from hail body damage – looked like a jilted SO had worked it over with a ball-pein hammer…

  5. Marin County Resident in Hot Tub: “Did you just feel the earth move?”

    Other Marin County Resident in Her Own Hot Tub: “Why ask me? I’m way over here.”

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