Watch Out, 'Cause Here It Comes

 This past Thursday, I had a couple of hours to contemplate my life. It did not rush past me in a flurry, but instead I had the opportunity to consider my choices and my overall vector through my time on Planet Earth. This came about as a direct adjunct to the Tsunami warning that was issued for the San Francisco Bay Area after a 7.0 earthquake rocked the little town of Ferndale, California. The geological and weather powers that be scrambled to come up with the worst case scenario. 

That scenario included the city of Oakland, California being crushed under a wall of water resulting from the sudden and violent displacement of the earth's crust near the coast. Suddenly, everyone's cell phone began to sputter and shout as one. What was not immediately clear from all the trumpets and sirens that came from our devices was just how seriously to take this warning. 

Abruptly, I became a resource for worried staff members who had not considered the conditions that would need to be in place for the announced catastrophe. To be fair, Tsunami warnings are not just handed out like those for "bomb cyclones" and "atmospheric rivers." This kind of natural disaster takes a high degree of specificity. The magnitude of the earthquake, the proximity to the coastline, the height of the tide are all points on a line that figure into the potential destruction. 

Standing on the playground of an elementary school, I did not have access to all these bits of data, so when panicked parents began to call us for suggestions of what to do next, I found myself called to the office to reassure a frightened staff. My calm take was that it was a warning, and that if an evacuation was necessary authorities would notify us along the same system that had sent out the initial scary cell phone alerts. This wasn't enough for one mom who drove the two blocks down to the school to pick her son and daughter up. It was not clear what her plan was after that, but there was still forty-five minutes left on the warning, so maybe she was heading for the hills.

The rest of us waited. I texted back and forth with my wife, who did me the favor of sending me the map of potential devastation from the USGS web site. It gave me a moment, mentioned earlier, to consider all those things that a tsunami could ruin. My house and home among them. 

Then, as abruptly as it had come, the warning was cancelled. No wall of water was making its way toward our city. We could go back to what we had been doing: playing and learning and working and waiting for the next calamity. The desperate mom drove her son and daughter back to school, but we didn't get to see how sheepish she might have felt, since she just dropped them at the curb and went back to her busy day. 

A day mercifully free of tidal waves.