DAMN! I missed it!
Sadly I was driving home from a friends when the quake struck, which made it kinda of confusing and almost impossible to feel.
As it happened, I was preparing to stop at Aviation Boulevard and Imperial Highway near LAX. I pulled up to the red light and stopped and at that moment thought I felt something strange---however sitting in a car you are isolated quite a bit from the ground motion. And it didn't help that at the same moment I was sitting at the light, a semi trailer heading east bound on Imperial bumped over the train tracks rather violently. So I attributed the weird feeling to the semitrailer.
So as I waited at the light, I did see one rather odd thing. Looking north toward LAX I could see a United A320 on approach to the south runway. As the aircraft crossed the threshold however, the pilot did not continue to flare and land the aircraft. It kind of did a low, slow fly by. Which is I thought odd because with a normal go around called, the aircraft should go gear up, throttle up and immediately climb and get ready to turn to avoid any departing traffic from the right side runway. But this United Airbus just slowly continued on, essentially flying above the runway about 100 feet. But again, I just dismissed it as odd, but not extraordinary.
As I proceeded on, I reached Century Boulevard and the text messages and calls started to fly. My friend Dan texted me he felt it and I talked to my friend Ron who felt it. DAMN! As I turned on to Century I realized it must have been something because a lot of people were standing around having vacated hotels, offices, and air freight buildings. Also the LAX fire department had removed all of their trucks from the fire station and parked them outside---as per normal procedure after a large quake. DAMN! I was really starting to get upset at this point!
By the time I got home the only evidence I found was by the pool---enough water had sloshed out that the deck was all wet. And the pool continued to be very wavy with a really, really cool low frequency wave. Essentially one end would rise about 6 inches over about 5 seconds while the other end would drop, and then it would slosh back to the other end of the pool. Normally you don't see that in the pool because simply jumping in doesn't produce that kind of motion. It takes something essentially shaking the whole pool at once to generate something like that.
Well, I wish I could have felt it---or even have been in the pool when it hit---but oh well.
Next time...
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