Earthquakes---The Utah Years

I had never felt an earthquake before I moved to Utah in 1991. And the earthquakes I experienced in Utah were pretty lame.

The first one I ever felt hit midmorning one day while I was hard at work dispensing technical support on the phone. My office was on the third floor of 3098 Highland Drive in Salt Lake City, a low rise office building. As I was seated at my desk with my head down staring at the floor and yapping into my headset I noticed my chair starting to rock back and forth ever so slightly on its wheels. About that same time, my officemate Dan said aloud 'I think we're having an earthquake.' Truly excited, I put the call on mute and jumped to my feet, but in that brief second the quake stopped. I stood expecting to feel more shaking, but there was nothing but rock steady disappointment. And of course there was no damage---it was probably what I would call a magnitude 2.5 or so quake.

The second quake I felt in Utah hit in the darkness of night while I was sleeping. I remember waking up and realizing that my hands were gripping the sides of my bed. As I became more conscious, I realized that my bed was gently shaking. Again the quake wasn't a big one, it quickly faded and I returned to sleep shortly thereafter. In the morning, I dismissed the episode as a dream until I saw the news mention a magnitude 5 quake near Afton, Wyoming. The quake had been felt on the east side of town (where I was living) because the rock in the Wasatch Mountains had transmitted the shaking rather well. Most of the Valley---being built on wash material, not rock---felt nothing.

Neither of these quakes were anything special. Minor temblors good for a brief adrenaline rush, nothing more...

Of additional note, while I was living in Utah the Kobe and Northridge quakes occurred. I remember watching coverage of both on television while at work at Sculptured Software. The image I will always have of Northridge is the aerial shot of the water and natural gas main break where the gas was burning. Such a strange sight.

Loma Prieta, Northern California October 1989

Even though I didn't know anyone in the Bay Area at the time, I have some pretty vivid memories of that day. I was a sophomore in college at the University of Evansville in Indiana studying electrical engineering.

As it happened, that night I was in the computer lab in the basement of the Koch Engineering building on campus. A friend of mine from high school, Jon, happened to be in town at the time and was hanging out in the building as well. Jon is---how should I put this---an individual prone to exaggerations, embellishments and flat out make believe. Anyway, as I was working away in the computer lab that night, Jon came in to inform me that a major earthquake had struck the bay area. And due to the World Series game at Candlestick Park, the Goodyear Blimp was in the area and now offering blimp coverage of the fires in San Francisco. That was too much for me to believe. Earthquake ? Yeah, I'd buy that. But blimp coverage of San Francisco burning ? No, I wasn't buying. So I continued working in the lab until my time was up.

Of course when I got back to my house, I found out it was all true. I watched the aerial coverage of the Marina fires and the Cypress Freeway collapse most of the night. It was such a 180 going from hearing something I knew for sure was false, only to have it be proven real.

As a post script to the story, a couple of years later Jon would end up taking a job at Borland Software in Scotts Valley ---mere miles from the epicenter. On my first trip after graduating college, I drove from Indiana out to Santa Cruz to visit him in 1991. Downtown Santa Cruz at that time consisted of a few buildings and a lot of white tents which were erected as temporary structures after the earthquake.

As for me, I ended up moving to the bay area in 1997. For 8 months I commuted from Point Richmond to Alameda, not realizing that I every morning I was detouring through the Oakland "Maze" because the Cypress Freeway was still being rebuilt. Just as I was about to move back to Los Angeles in 1998 the new Cypress Freeway was completed and I made the connection to the 1989 quake...

The Purpose of This Blog

As I was browsing the LA Times website a week or two ago, I happened upon an article mentioning that this week is the 20 year anniversary of the Lome Prieta Earthquake. Furthermore, they asked their readers to submit their stories and memories of that famous quake. The article can be found here

Since I thought those stories were very cool and great reading, I decided to blog about my earthquake experiences---ones I have felt (living in SoCal or Utah) and ones that I have memories of from the news.

I'll add all of my past earthquake experiences first and then I'll only update the blog when there's a new one...