EARTHQUAKE!!!!!
October 15, 2006
Hawaii got hit with a couple of earthquakes today. The largest one registered about 6.6 on the richter scale. In comparison, the Northridge earthquake from around 1990 registered a 6.7 on the richter scale, so yea, it was a pretty big one.
My information is still pretty shaky since the whole island here was without power after the earthquakes hit. I think there we got hit with a couple of big quakes though. The first registered at 5 something on the richter.
I had gone to bed around 5 in the morning and the initial shaking woke me up. My grandma was coming towards where I was sleeping and asked me what happened. I was still groggy, but I said it felt like an earthquake and then right after that, the second one hit and that was a bit upsetting since I was sleeping on the couch and the couch was really shaking – well, not shaking, but jerking – like I was stuck in a tug of war between 2 giants just pushing and pulling really fast. It went on for awhile – like at least 10 or maybe 15 seconds.
Your sense of time really gets messed up during an earthquake. It could have lasted for maybe 5 seconds, but time always seems longer during an earthquake. Well, it certainly woke me up. My grandma was carrying the cat when it happened and right before the house start shaking, the cat jumped out of her arms and ran under the couch. My mom came over from her side of the house and we went to turn on the TV to get some news and then about 30 seconds later, the power went out – EVERYWHERE.
Luckily we had batteries and we turned the radio on, but none of the stations were on the air, except for 1 and they were playing one of those pre recorded shows for quite awhile and so we were pretty much in the dark about what really happened and that was the most disturbing part of it all for me. I tried the cell phone and my first couple of tries didn’t go through. I finally got through to my friend Fred and he didn’t have power either and we were joking that a nuke went off nearby – but obviously not since our phones were still working and the EMP would have wiped out all electronic devices.
My mom called my brother in law to check the USGS website and that is how we were able to verify the quake – by calling someone on the mainland – how fucked up is that? I tried calling Tom to see if he might be able to get some information for me, but he didn’t answer his phone. Doh.
Finally a real person got to the radio station on air and that’s how we found out that the power was out everywhere and the details about what happened started coming in.
Apparently what happened with the electricity was that the generators have trip mechanisms to shut down if there is too much seismic activity. I guess so that generators don’t get off balance and all of a sudden jump into another one or something. We didn’t have power about 13 hours, which was kind of funny – but not really I guess. None of the water pumping stations had power and neither did any of the sewage treatment plants so it was stressed that everyone needed to conserve water. As soon as I heard that, I filled up several containers of water that should last us a couple of days.
I was just soo tired. We listened to the radio for a couple of hours and then we all went back to sleep for a little while.
I just feel pretty lucky about it all. We didn’t have power to cook obviously, so our cousins downstairs lent us a couple of butane cooking things to cook with. We always have a lot of flashlights around and my mom has lots of candles too. We also have manual can openers, Hurray!, and my mom has this storage container full of batteries, so we were going to be okay.
I did get through to my sister and she called our cousin on the Big Island that was hit the hardest and my cousin seemed a bit shook up about it. It sounded like that there was some structural damage at her house where a couple of support beams shifted about an inch and all the books from their bookshelves fell on the floor, but she and her husband are okay.
I did a brief visual inspection of the house here and everything seems okay. There was 1 crack in some support cement blocks, but I honestly don’t know if that is new or if it was there before. There is also a small space between the porch and a wall that I never noticed before, so that might be new too.
It would have been a perfect night for stargazing here if the power had not come on, except that it’s been cloudy and rainy all day.
Of course, the shopper in me is also happy I decided to go to the craft store to use my 40% coupon yesterday instead of waiting until today!
Filed under: Whatever
