Natural Disaster Musings

Telling someone you’re from California often brings the response, ‘I could never live in a place with all those earthquakes.” Granted that is a serious concern, and is something always in the back of my mind. I’ve experienced several earthquakes, most are described as “Nature’s Rollercoaster”, scary while on the ride but strangely thrilling after the shaking stops.

The exception was the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. I was on BART (the Bay Area’s train system for the uninitiated, the acronym stands for Barely Able to Run on Time), on an elevated section of track when it hit. For several seconds I was honestly afraid the train would be shaken off the tracks. I was also wondering how it felt to anyone traveling under the bay in the Transbay Tube. It turned out that structure was so over engineered the quake was barely felt, though of course that didn’t stop anyone from inventing harrowing stories of survival. Anything to impress the gullible so you could get free drinks out of them.

But “The Big One” has yet to hit, and it is close to being overdue. So with my move to Texas I get to shed myself of that paranoia, and pick up new ones in tornadoes, hail storms, floods and hurricanes. Nothing like variety. I was in one small tornado in Virginia in the early 1990’s; the worst it did was give a few apartments skylights in the complex I was living in.

For hurricanes, in 1998 I was in Florida for a training class when Georges came churning up the west coast of the state. The night before it hit, I was in a hotel bar with my counterparts from our Denver and Dallas offices. The two guys from D.C. who had taught the class had already split, but the rest of us weren’t scheduled to leave until morning. I envisioned the D.C. gents were preparing a report, “The class went exceptionally well, however we now have openings in our Denver, Dallas and San Francisco offices.”

My flight the next morning was the last one out before the Tampa airport closed. A month later I was sent to Guam, just in time for a typhoon to blow through. It was just strong enough to create a bit of excitement, but no damage. So two trips, two storms. Yet for some reason no one in my office wanted to travel with me afterwards.