Quake Delay

Yesterday, seven million Californians joined in a rehearsal for what we all assume is inevitable: The Big One. People up and down the state crawled under desks and stood in doorways while emergency agencies and hospitals began response drills and mass casualty exercises. Let that last one roll around in your head for a moment: mass casualty exercises. Earthquakes are a fact of life here on the left edge of the country, and it is no coincidence that so many folks decided to check their preparedness level at this moment.
Let's wind the clock back two decades. I was still living in Colorado, and I was on my way to my weekly rendezvous with two slices of pepperoni and a large Coke. As I passed the Curtis Mathes showroom, a there were a few looky-loos watching the pre-game festivities before the the third game of the World Series. I remember saying aloud, perhaps with the thought that some other vaguely interested sports fan might appreciate my humor, that the only way that the San Francisco Giants would win a game in this series would be if there was an earthquake. I said this because of the seemingly unstoppable force that was the Oakland A's in 1989. I continued on down the mall to my pizza. Half an hour later, after I had made the most of my meal, the crowd in front of the TV store was full and overflowing. "Must be a real close game," I thought as I approached the murmuring throng. But there was no game.
It was the Loma Prieta earthquake. Fifteen seconds of six point nine Richter scale fury. I watched Al Michaels, and later Ted Koppel, describe the devastation. Thanks to that baseball game, the casualties were relatively small, with fifty-seven dead and less than four thousand injured, only four hundred of them severe. For five years, this was "the big one," until the Northridge quake in 1994.
And now, twenty years later, my living room is just a few miles from the Hayward fault, but I live in a house that has surfed through the 1906 and the 1989 tremblers, along with all the other "nuisance quakes" that have jostled us here and there in between. We've got our earthquake kit outside under the porch. We have plans for where to go and who to call if we aren't together when the ground starts to shake again. It could happen again. Anytime. Stay tuned.