Sean's+Story

It was a Sunday night at approximately 8:39 pm while I was watching a movie with my family. Our house was positioned right on the hanging wall of a normal fault. My 3ft tall wife was intensely watching the movie when she felt a small vibration. Then she told us, "quick! Climb under that table an earthquake is coming!!" I had no idea what she was talking about so I started to panic but then I realized that those vibrations where the p waves that where showing up. I knew that this was going to be a big earthquake because there hadn’t been one in many years. So we all dove under the kitchen table and waited in fear. Boom! The big file cabinet in my office fell over. Then I remembered when I bought this apartment they told us that it was a base-isolated building. Then I looked out the window even though I knew it was not safe to go near glass. Out the window I saw all the buildings around us swaying like crazy. Finally after about 15 seconds of crazy rumbling it began to stop. My family and I began to stand up and clean up the disaster that the earthquake had caused in my house. After about one hour of cleaning up my wife made us some ice cream Sundays to calm down the little kids that where screaming in terror. Then a horrible thought occurred in my head. Are my parents okay? So I called their house phone, they answered it and said that they where all right but part of their roof fell and killed their dog named cubbins. That was very sad news to my children but I was just happy that my parents survived. I invited them over and they arrived 10 minutes later. Just as they arrived all of a sudden the ground started to shake again! This must be an aftershock! The building swayed but then quickly stopped. This was not nearly as big as the first one so it didn’t really affect us as badly. It was about 10:00 pm at this time so I told everyone to go to sleep.

The next morning I turned on the news, the earthquake was said to be a 7.8 with a 4.3 aftershock on the Richter scale. Then it said that the earthquake was a VIII on the Mercalli scale. The earthquake was right off the shore of California so it started a tsunami. The tsunami won’t affect us though because our house was so far in land. The tsunami caused some major damage in the big cities along the cost of California. The news also showed peoples houses being destroyed and told us that shelters where available for the ones who needed it. This earthquake was said to be the worst earthquake in 10 years. In the end 2,000 people where killed and 5,000 where hurt. Since that tragic experience my family has moved as far away from a fault as possible.