Saturday, February 27, 2010

Earthquake

Listening to:
東京事変
スポーツ

Woke up this morning at 5:30 thanks to a pretty big earthquake. It was reportedly a magnitude 6.9 quake that lasted for about 30 seconds. Although 30 seconds probably doesn't seem like a long time in print, it honestly feels like an eternity when you're waiting for the roof to cave in on you. My girlfriend's cell phone apparently has some sort of a natural disaster warning system function, because it started sounding this ridiculous "your space station will imminently explode" type alarm when the quake hit. That's all good and well, but the thing went off in the midst of the earthquake while the world was ending, so the whole time that the alarm was sounding, I was just like, "F***, I know, I know!" For the most part, the quake felt a lot worse than it actually turned out to be, but tsunami warnings were issued, a point of concern since the beach is right across the street from my apartment. We decided to play it safe and move to higher ground (more for fear for our cars than for our personal well-being) and made the trek to her place in our pajamas at the break of dawn. A Tsunami Bomb track is the second song that comes on when I shuffle through my music on the drive over, which is ironic but not at all funny.

In the end, it sounded like everyone on the island it made it through the ordeal unscathed. We watched the news for a bit, went to sleep again and woke up a few hours later with the world back to normal. Not exactly my definition of an ideal Saturday morning, but hey, you can always make up sleep.

4 comments:

cr8 said...

i heard that it was close (relatively) to the surface so that's why there were no tsunamis. the 8.8 that just hit Chile is much deeper so i imagine that'll hit us as well. stay safe.

cr8 said...

tsunamis will likely hit us, i mean. not earthquakes, hopefully...

marq said...

times like these i wish that i paid more attention in geophysics class.

thaichaiguy said...

Glad you are safe. The part about the alarm was hilarious.