On the morning of Tuesday, December 20th at approximately 2:30 in the morning I was awoken out of a soft gentle slumber to the bed shaking and my phone blaring with an alarm. As I come out of my sleep state I realize "oh there's an earthquake" but then it shakes harder and the sound of my whole house being shaken gets louder. The whole time I'm waking up, along with the wild rumble of the earthquake is the stupid earthquake alarm on EVERYONE in my house's phone. Those earthquake alarms seem kind of stupid and pointless in a situation like this. It's like - "oh really? there's an earthquake happening right now? I had no idea, thanks earthquake alarm" Nothing like a jarring alarm sound to make your house shaking like hell even more freaky of a situation. I was just standing there next to the bed screaming and from most earthquake experiences, I was sort of expecting it to stop but it didn't. I have felt many earthquakes in my lifetime. I will say this was the first one that made me feel like a flying saucer was using a tractor beam to rip my whole house from the earth and suck up into it's guts. That's what it felt like. The shaking, the phone alarm, the transformers blowing and flashing outside my window. It was some real life freaky fucked up sci-fi shit.
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| Merry Christmas! |
I don't think this is fair because I actually don't remember doing this but Meg keeps making fun of me for yelling "THIS IS IT! THIS IS IT!" and screaming while it was happening. She was smart and immediately got in the doorway. When it finally stopped we immediately checked on our family who was visiting from out of town. Luckily they are also life long Californians and have been in plenty of earthquakes. I cant imagine if they were from out of state. Once a friend from Florida was with me in California for the first time and we had a little shaker. Everyone there was like "oh earthquake! haha" and then I see him face down on the ground yelling "WHATDOWEDO?!! WHATDOWEDO!!??" It's probably not cool to laugh but it was pretty hilarious. Our houseguests were like us, pretty shaken but also calm enough to help us take stock of the damage around our house. What had fallen or broken, helped us look for our pets. A book case tipped most of its books out. Many small Christmas decorations fell off the fireplace and broke. Some of my painted bottles and sculptures fell over but didn't break. A lot of stuff shifted around or fell off shelves but nothing major was broken. I think we got pretty lucky considering some of the damage we later found out about from our friends and around the county. It was the middle of the night so we didn't right away notice that the power was out. We quickly realized that it was out at least in our neighborhood but then later found out pretty much the entire county of Humboldt had no power.
Once we finally calmed down a bit we were able to communicate with friends in town and check in on each other. We then learned that it was a 6.1 upgraded to a 6.4 just around 20 miles from us. But we later learned there was a 4.7 quake a minute after the first one that was even closer to us. It was almost like 2 earthquakes back to back. Our friends who live on our street called and said they needed my help. A 12 foot brick chimney that went from above their kitchen to the peak of their roof collapsed in the attic and put a large hole in their kitchen ceiling. We put a big tarp over the hole in the roof and I went back home to help clean up and to make sure everyone was OK. During this whole time, and pretty much all day today we've been having aftershocks. They were as big as a fairly decent random quake on any other day. They range from the mid 4's and 3's. I'm still on edge and think every little bump and loud noise is an earthquake. We all are. Once the sun came up I went back over to my friend's house and helped them extract a chimney brick by brick from the attic. There's still a huge hole in their kitchen ceiling but I just saw that they screwed the hanging boards back up and covered the hole with a New Kids on the Block poster. Well done! Jordan and Donny save the day. Most of the damage from my friends was mostly broken dishes, a shattered shower door, a mirror, broken toilet seat and stuff like that. Many people in the area closer to the epicenter had it really bad though. A friend's co-worker's house moved off its foundation almost 2 feet. I just read that several houses were "red flagged" as unsafe. Very scary. The power started to trickle back on around town in the early evening and things started to feel more normal but there's still a pile of books on my floor I haven't cleaned up yet. Parts of the area still don't have power and don't even have drinking water. Lots of broken windows and merchandise shaken off shelves in businesses and damage to old unreinforced masonry buildings around the county. The hardware store I work at was closed yesterday because they didn't have power. Lots of mess throughout the store was cleaned up before I arrived this morning. This area has officially been declared a state of emergency and as I type this communities are still without essentials and reports of damage and injuries are still coming in.
I remember noticing that throughout the silent and very dark early morning hours and even through the rest of the day that it was kind of odd that I didn't hear any sirens of emergency vehicles. As of now the reports for the whole county there were a handful of injuries and only two deaths. Any death is sad but I am shocked it wasn't more considering how violent this quake was.
It was a gnarly one and many have had life changing effects from this but I keep thinking it could have been way worse. Every time something like this happens I'm reminded that I am grossly underprepared for things like this. I'll say this but not do it... make sure to have an emergency kit ready to go.
Thank you to everyone from outside of the area for checking in on us up here.
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