wiredfool

Well, that was fun.

What worked:

• (DSL) Net Connections.
• AIM
• UPS Backup
• Some blogs that had good power/connections that I could post to the discussion group.
• Cell Phone Text Messaging.
• The outside door that has been locked for 6 months

What Didn’t.

• Cell Phones
• Not having a generator
• My weblog, because I don’t have a generator
• My email, because I don’t have a generator
• Brittle buildings on poor soil.

This was the biggest quake that I’ve been through, but the public reaction to it scared me more than the actual event. This was not “THE BIG ONE”. Not Even Close. If you’re in the big one, you’ll know it. Probably because you’ll look out what’s left of your window and see a bunch of buildings on the ground. This earthquake caused scattered damage to vulnerable
buildings. Buildings that were for the most part built before earthquake resistance was an issue and on soil that amplifies earthquake response.

Maybe this causes people to realize that earthquakes are going to happen in this area. Maybe now we’ll base isolate Harborview. But I’m worried that people will think, “That was a 7, it wasn’t so bad”. It was also 30 miles away and 30 miles deep.

If that had been a Seattle Fault earthquake, I don’t think Pioneer Square would have survived. My office probably wouldn’t have survived. It’s supposed to be capable of a 7.0, near the surface. (And the fault passes just south of pioneer square, about where the kingdome used to be.) The ground motion intensity of that would probably be 10 times what we felt. The “BIG ONE” would probably be 100 times worse.

But Smile, at least Ranier didn’t respond with sympathetic earthquakes.