According to Wikipedia, “at 10:54:32 local time on February 28, 2001” the Nisqually earthquake occurred.  My office in Kirkland WA is 45 miles away, but I felt it.  At the time, I was in my office taking the medical history from an elderly Japanese woman and her caregiver.  As the quake began, the elderly lady dived under the desk, while the caregiver and I looked at each other and around the room, trying to figure out what was going on.  We concluded it was an earthquake, but in the minute it was happening, neither of us moved.  Then the quake ended, and the elderly woman got right back up and into her chair, and announced, “That wasn’t very big!” with a smile, and then resumed giving me her medical history.  We continued for a couple of minutes, and then a sharp rap on my door announced “Evacuate the building!!”, so we stopped and went outside while staff checked the building for safety to return, went back in, and resumed our day.

When I went home, the news had pictures of extensive damage to old buildings in downtown Seattle, cracks in roads, and chimneys collapsing.  My neighbor across the street lost his chimney.  At my house, a loose baseball on a bookshelf in my son’s room seemed not to have moved nor rolled, at all.  A couple of days later I noticed the long crack in the bricks running along the hallway outside the very exam room I had been in.  Our building had broken in the quake!

Then, and only then, I realized that although the fast action of the Japanese woman had come, of course, from childhood experience and perhaps later, in Japan, of larger earthquakes, her assessment of this one had modified my response to a blase indifference.  After all, it “wasn’t very big!”.  It was, however, 6.8 on the Richter scale, and without her might have seemed much more significant.  

At the least, the whole event was both memorable and again, a teachable moment.  I learn many of my lessons the hard way.  I’m grateful there were so few injuries.  We’re waiting around here for the next “Big One”, the 9.0 quake that drops the coastline 10 feet and slides mountains into lakes.  They have happened and will again, about every 700 years.  According to a FEMA exercise, the next one will knock out all the hospitals but mine, shut down the internet, the highways, electricity, gas, etc. etc.  Basically all the infrastructure.  The emergency plan, then, is to enlist the military and national guard to evacuate all of the 2.6 million in the Seattle area to Eastern Washington or elsewhere.  In simpler terms, it will be a devastating disaster.

One thought on “My response to the earthquake was culturally modified”
  1. Down the hall in the lab, our Technologist had a needle in a patient’s arm. I was in the back room running the chemistry analyzer and remember just holding on and praying the (sometimes leaky) roof wouldn’t collapse on us. When the shaking stopped and we gathered outside, I learned that the patient had insisted that the Tech. continue the blood draw through the shaking, to avoid an additional “stick”. I was a little shocked, but she was fine. Meanwhile my husband’s office building in Renton, (one of the Boeing offices), was pretty severely damaged, & they all had to evacuate down a stairwell, during the quake. He had to leave his car in the underground parking lot for a day or two. He grabbed a ride from a colleague to the clinic and showed up there a couple of hours after the quake, shaken but safe!
    Meanwhile at Kirkland Jr High, as the students were holding on, under their desks, one of my daughters’ friends called out “Happy birthday, Rachel” as it was her birthday. LOL, Kids! They were all fine too, luckily!
    Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Dr B, it’s always fun to read your Tales!

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