Earthquakes on my mind

The earthquake in New Zealand reminds me of how, not a day goes by when I don't think about earthquakes. I grew up on the East coast, and never really knew anything about them, until I came to college in California and settled here. Even then, it was a few years before I would experience one.

It was 1971, and I had a baby and a toddler, when early one morning we were awakened by the shaking, grabbed both children and ran outside. We were in Altadena, and we could see the flashes of light as transformers all over the Valley were exploding, and we stood shakily watching and feeling the earth receding and moving as we stood there. Finally, we took the children inside. Several kitchen cabinets had spilled out their contents. From that day forward, I always close cabinets tightly, even thought that aspect hasn't happened again.

The next earthquake happened at around 7:45 AM as we were about to leave for school, in 1987. This one struck like a hammer - in fact, we thought maybe a truck had hit the house, but then the earth rumbled once again. My son had been upstairs, and he lurched down the stairs as I huddled under the doorjamb in the kitchen. Both of us ran outside, and saw that the field stone chimney on our roof had partially collapsed, and the loud sounds we had heard had been those stones bouncing down the roof and into the yard. It turned out that 100 chimneys in our Pasadena neighborhood, near the Arroyo, had fallen in this quake. Most of these houses had been built in the 1900 to 1920 craftsman building period. Our house had been built in 1908. We were only the third owner. It was the original chimney, and it was repaired and the roof was replaced.

The next earthquake I experienced happened around 7:30 AM, and I had just come in from my swimming workout at Caltech, in June of 1991. There were around ten of us in a large shower room, and we were naked. When the building started to shake, no one knew whether to run outside naked or to grab clothes or whatever. But it was a quick shake, and did not seem to cause any damage, but it did give us all a scare. I think one is more vulnerable when naked.

In 1994, there was another bad earthquake, centered in Northridge. I remember that one for two major reasons. We didn't feel it as much in Pasadena, but a concrete wall fell and killed a student walking by at Cal State Los Angeles. One of my students, at Pasadena City College, was in an apartment building in Northridge that collapsed early that morning and killed several people on the first floor, including her sister. You just never forget experiences like this.

So, maybe it isn't surprising that every day, I think about earthquakes. Some of the ways that the memory of earthquakes affects me are:  every time I close a kitchen cabinet door and every time I drive under a freeway overpass; every time I walk from the swimming pool to my car at UC Irvine, along a building with large concrete overhangs. The possibility of an earthquake affects my daily life, but really, I don't let this get in the way of all the things that I do. I just think about it.