San Jose Earthquake Errata

Two windows blew out of the control tower at the airport.

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The top three floors of our joint campus/city library (on the campus where I teach) are closed as employees work to reshelve 300,000 books.

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The eight-story library reportedly "swayed like a palm tree" during the quake--a good thing. Flexibility is the essence of intelligence in an earthquake (for both buildings and humans).

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Backflash: During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, I was on the campus in a three-story classroom building. Indeed, the building swayed like a palm tree--after bucking like a wild horse. The next week when I was back in the building, I had the sensation it was swaying again even though I knew it wasn't. A kind of California PTS.

Boo!

The epicenter of the earthquake was very close to our house, but can you believe we missed it? We were driving home on the freeway and felt no sensations at all. We walked into our house, and the first thing I noticed was that our telephone and answering machine were missing. My first thought was that someone had broken into the house. We discovered the phone had fallen behind the piece of furniture it's perched on.

We then scanned for anything else awry and in the living room saw some of our framed photos has fallen over.

"Oh, I bet there was an earthquake!" I said and turned on the TV. Yep, there were those reporters covering objects falled from store shelves, their eyes betraying their craving for more disaster.

It took hours for our cat to reappear from an especially good hiding place in the house. She's fine today.

It's amazing there wasn't more damage. It was a long earthquake, begun with a jolt. Our friend Sharon came over on her motorcycle to help us sniff for gas and to see how we were. She said, "Ah, yes, October--earthquake season." It's probably a coincidence, but the big 1989 quake occurred in October. All I can say is, "Welcome November."