Natural and Man Made Disasters

This morning, I had just finished shoveling the driveway and was in the entryway of my house, having just taken off my socks and shoes, when the earthquake hit. It was immediately clear that this one was serious. If you’ve ever been in a big earthquake, you may know that powerless “I think maybe the world is ending” feeling that comes when the earth starts shaking violently.

It only took a moment or two of seeing the walls of my house bend and hearing the creak and groan of its straining structure to decide that I should go outside immediately, without waiting to see if the house would remain standing. I reached for my shoes, but then decided against it.  What if the house collapsed on me just because I was too stubborn to go outside barefoot and get cold feet? So I stepped  barefoot outside the house into the driveway that I’d just finished shoveling.

Every once in a while, it's nice to see the sun. Solvang, California.

I felt I was pretty well prepared for this moment by my experiences of the previous days.  Two days ago, after a week of cycling and easy living in sunshine and seventy five degrees in the Santa Ynez valley in California, D and I drove through Thousand Oaks and Malibu, where a massive fire the week before had scorched an entire mountain range and a lot of houses.  We saw piles of ashes where houses had been, burned-down electrical lines and telephone poles, and burned-down guardrails along the road we were driving on.  It was a real disaster area!  What’s more, the fire started less than two days after someone gathered up their guns and went into a local bar to kill twelve people for no apparent reason. It occurred to me that the living wasn’t so easy in Thousand Oaks lately.  If you go out to the bar, someone tries to shoot you; if you stay home, your house burns down.

When the weather's grim in Alaska in November and you want to go on a little cycling trip, the Santa Ynez valley gets my stamp of approval.

The very next day I was on Kodiak Island, in a little village called Port Lions for a work assignment. Port Lions was founded in 1965 for the sole purpose of housing the people of the Native Village of Afognak, whose town had been wiped out by the tsunami from the big 1964 earthquake. I rode out to the Port Lions airstrip for my plane ride back to Kodiak with a woman named Liz, who was six years old when the tsunami struck her village of Afognak. She described how they watched all the water drain out of the bay. The elders had an inkling of what was going to happen next and ordered everyone to run for their lives up the side of the mountain as fast as they could.  From up on the hillside, they watched the tsunami sweep in and wash their village away. Liz told me about being up on the hillside, in radio contact with her uncle, Sut Larsen, as he tried to get his fishing boat far enough away from shore to escape the giant wave. As he saw the breaking wave towering above him, he had just enough time to call his family on the shortwave radio and say his goodbyes.

Flying from Kodiak to Port Lions in the Cherokee.  Port Lions is at the back of the bay dead ahead.  Kodiak is behind us.

As I rode my bike to Anchorage Int'l for my flight to Kodiak, there was a thin layer of icy snow on the ground, but it was starting to snow pretty good by the time we boarded the plane, de-iced, and left town. When I returned to Anchorage 24 hours later, the city had been coated in a couple inches of fresh white snow. Considering how brown and miserable it's been around here lately, the fresh white landscape was divine!  Getting up this morning, I decided to shovel my driveway. Not because it was desperately important that I clear off the two inches of snow. But because it seemed like a great excuse to do a "winter thing".  An El Nino year, we are forecast to have a rainy, brown miserable winter. So if we get an inch or two of snow, you're damn right I'm going to go out and shovel it and call it "winter life".

My shoveling experience had been every bit as glorious as I'd dreamed it could be, and I was feeling pretty good about myself when I came back inside to change my clothes and get on my bike to ride to the office. Next thing I knew, I was standing outside, barefoot, watching the earth moving in waves, the trees bending, and the deep bass rumble of the earthquake, and car alarms going off around the neighborhood. An earthquake like that is one of the most powerful things I have ever experienced, and it stands to reason that when you're experiencing it barefoot in the frozen dirt, you're having just about the purest earthquake experience you can get.  No framing joists dampening the shock waves, no concrete, no steel I-beams hung from hangars in the sub-floor.  Not even any foam rubber midsole in a pair of sneakers to insulate you from the raw power coming up from below.  When you're standing in the frozen driveway, barefoot, you're getting the pure, unfiltered raw power of the thing!

After the ground had been shaking for a while, and it didn't seem to be losing any of its power, it occurred to think about what lay ahead for me this day. Was my house going to cave in?  Was I going to find myself one of these people who have to go camp out at a shelter and accept donated clothes because I'd lost everything?  Since my shoes, jacket, wallet and cell phone were just inside the doorway, it was a no-brainer to reach in and grab that stuff.  They could really come in handy if this thing got any more intense and the apocalypse truly was upon us, as it seemed to be. 

Back again in the driveway, putting on my shoes and jacket, I started to worry that I might fall down.  How embarrassing that would be! Wouldn't it mean I was getting weak and frail if I couldn't even stay on my feet during an earthquake? I looked around to see if anybody was around to see me and ridicule me if I did fall down as I feared I might.  But at 8:30am it's still dark so I realized it was pretty unlikely anyone would see me if I fell down.  I wouldn't mind admitting to people later that I'd fallen down, putting it into a funny story and distancing myself from the shame of it, simply by the passage of time.  24 hours later, I could tell the story of falling down in my driveway, and it would be as if it wasn't really ME who fell down.  It was the "me of yesterday" who fell down. My thoughts went to my conversation yesterday with Liz about her experience in the '64 quake.  Was this the beginning of what was going to become a surreal, nightmarish day, full of sirens and gas leaks and ambulances and triage?

By and by, the shaking slowed down and stopped, and I went inside my house to see what disasters had befallen it while I was out standing in my driveway.  Turns out, the place was pretty much unscathed. There were a few remarkable things, though.  Some items moved a great distance during the earthquake, while other things that I'd have expected to be smashed to bits seemed as if they'd skipped the earthquake altogether.  For example, I have a rug in my living room that must have been doing the inchworm across the floor because it moved halfway across the room.  I would like to have seen that!  But right next to it, I have a tall, skinny CD storage rack. On top of it sits a huge, heavy potted plant.  This thing is so skinny and top heavy it looks like it's lucky to remain standing even on the calmest windless days.  It didn't tip over even as pictures had fallen off the walls, and shelves (and the dining room table) had dumped their contents all over the floor. But in the bathroom, the water had sloshed out of the toilet and splashed all over the floor. (Good thing I flushed.) I checked the garage, which, besides my tools having fallen off the wall and all over the floor, was in pretty OK shape.  My car tire was flat, but I suspect that had little to do with the earthquake.

That rug in the foreground moved halfway across the room. The CD case in the background (right) didn't tip over. Weird.

As the excitement seemed to have come to an end, I got on my bicycle and rode to the office to put in a day at the desk. On my way there, I passed traffic backed up for many blocks, hardly moving. I assumed the streetlights had probably stopped working. It wasn't until I got to the office that I found out from my coworkers that a several sections of roadway had collapsed, crippling the city's transportation system. 

D, who's a fourth grade teacher, told me they'd let all the kids go home from school. When I asked her how they'd handled the earthquake situation, she told me it was a breeze for the kids. They do so many "active shooter" drills, where they practice what to do when a gunophile comes into their school and starts shooting children, that a major earthquake is no biggie.  And let's be realistic, which tragedy is more likely here in the USA?

The schools weren't the only ones to close down.  It seemed everyone's nerves were pretty well shot by 9am, and most everyone in the city decided to just pack it in for the day, go home, and maybe do some cleaning up around the house and have a stiff drink.  

11:30am today. These parking lots are always 100% packed full on workdays.

When I got home in the evening after a full day in an empty office (all of my coworkers had bailed by late morning), I thought it would be nice to take out the fat bike for a cruise around town, maybe survey some of the damage that I'd read about on the internet news reports and seen in photos.  Going out for a nice evening fat bike ride would be an activity in the same vein as the morning's shoveling mission - a way to get out and enjoy the local winter scenery, while it lasts. So I put on the reflective vest and blinking lights and headed out on the streets of the city. I found a small collapsed section of coastal trail, but little else visibly damaged. When I rode by Westchester Lagoon, I noticed that the ice on the lake had been broken up into pieces by the quake, and folks were out strolling around on the ice, looking at the cracks.  You could see where water had sloshed up through the cracks and splashed all over the ice. But the most notable thing I saw during my ride was all the people out and about, just enjoying a winter evening outside. We smiled at each other as we passed. Out for evening walks, hand in hand. Out for leisurely fat bike rides together, discussing the day's earthquake.  Out sledding with the kids on little grassy hillsides in parks. Just out, enjoying the evening together. I wondered, was I projecting my own emotions on the people I saw out walking, hand in hand, with smiles on their faces?  Were there always this many people out, enjoying a winter evening, and I'd just never noticed before?  Or was this night different?  Were these people like me - with nerves jangled by the force of the morning's earthquake, but thankful for the luxury of being able to go out in our city, and simply enjoy the winter scene?

Postscript: I guess I'm the only witness to this earthquake from the whole UAA Ski Team. The nordic team flew to Fairbanks last night for a weekend of ski racing against the UAF Nanooks.  And the alpine team is training in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory this week.

With all the chaos and nervousness around us here in Anchorage, it was a nice surprise to get a note from my friend Per in Lillehammer, Norway, whom I'd gotten to know when I lived there in the 1980's. He mentioned that he had stopped to pick up our former Seawolf Sadie Bjornsen, who was hitch-hiking back to her hotel. The next day, she was on the podium in the sprint race.

Sadie Bjornsen, in a familiar place.