Open Writing

So much has been written, televised, and promulgated on the Internet about the terrible earthquake in Haiti, that anything I could write would be superfluous and redundant. Sadly, although the suffering and devastation are extreme, our exposure to terrible events is constant, and I find it impossible to react in the humanistic way I think I should.

Since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hurricane Katrina’s destruction in New Orleans, the Tsunami at Aceh in Indonesia, the earthquakes in China, and the terrible events on the African continent and in Bangladesh, I have become inured to the misery, pain and suffering of unfortunate people.

Even so, I don’t underrate the value of saturation news coverage when it comes to raising funds for rescue efforts. I always hope it finds its way into the right hands. So, instead of riding on the misery of the Haitians, I thought I would relate a quiet story of my own encounter with an earthquake.

In October 1987, I attended a week-long conference in Santa Ana, California, and stayed in a modern hotel near to the Hilton conference center. My room was on the thirteenth floor of perhaps forty, and naturally the question crossed my mind of what that would mean if an earthquake occurred, but I didn’t dwell on it, even though Santa Ana sits on the San Andreas fault.

Californians have a strange attitude of denial about temblors. If a non-Californian expresses concern, the response is “You guys worry too much.” This is probably not an unreasonable way to deal with what is a constant threat. There is a weather web page for the Los Angeles area, where Santa Ana is located, that lists recent earthquakes and their strength.

Amazingly, the chronology is based on hours ago, rather than years ago! The strengths are in the 1.0 to 4.0 range on the Richter scale, which is logarithmic rather than linear, so each whole number equals a ten-fold increase in force. Unless you were concentrating, probably you would not notice a strength 1.0 event, but you would a strength 4.0, unless of course you are a Californian.

My personal event occurred at 3 am. I was in a deep sleep, but knew immediately what was happening. The shock felt as though my bed had been picked up about 3 feet and dropped, and there was an explosive bang. Adrenalin had me wide away in a nanosecond. I’d heard that the immediate safety precaution is to stand in a doorway, always supposing there is a doorway to stand in.

Though in retrospect the idea seems ridiculous, that’s what I did. There I stood, naked, hanging on to the doorframe as the creaking and groaning building rocked back and forth; deriving irrational comfort from the fact that the doorframe was metal, not wood. At any moment I expected the hotel tower I was in to topple over. I also expected to hear screams and shouting but there were none. I began to think I was the only occupant of the thirteenth floor.

After a while, the swaying subsided a little; enough for me to think about grabbing some clothes from the closet directly opposite from where I stood. I desperately wanted to get out of the hotel, but was afraid of leaving my doorframe for the unknown outside. But in the end, staying put in the dark wasn’t very attractive either.

I dressed hurriedly, left my room and made a dash for the stairway. Thank heaven there was emergency lighting, dim as it was, in the windowless stairwell. The trip to the ground floor seemed endless and surreal. I saw no one else, and the only sounds were of my feet clattering down the concrete steps.

Once at the bottom, I found myself in a crowd of people, huddled under an overhanging mezzanine floor that surrounded an atrium. The atrium was empty of people, and immediately I knew why, as immense shards of plate glass fell from above, exploding into millions of fragments as they hit the marble floor.

A staff member led us out of the atrium by a route sheltered from the falling glass by the mezzanine overhang. The enormous feeling of relief we experienced once we were out of the building was rapidly dissipated by the realization that the hotel was towering above us, and for all we knew could come crashing down.

Across the road outside the hotel was a very large, empty parking lot associated with Disney Land, so we made a dash for it and didn’t stop running until we were sure we were out of the range of falling masonry. We spent the rest of the night there, tensing as each aftershock rocked the ground under our feet.

Overall, the damage throughout Santa Ana from the 6.5 strength quake wasn’t extreme. Some buildings were condemned, and there were some casualties, though I don’t remember whether anyone died. It was only later that I discovered the hotel had been built to a Japanese design, supposedly able to withstand much worse earthquakes, though I wouldn’t want to put the design theory to the test.

The design involved an enormous pendulum that hung from the top of the hotel to the basement. This was intended to oppose the swaying and keep it within structural limits. I think the hotel staff might have told us that when we checked in. My abiding memory of the experience is of the dreadful feeling of helplessness, and of not knowing how or where to find safety.

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