Earthquake Last Night in Arizona?

That’s right, folks. Last night at 11:30 PM I was reading in my home office when I heard some strange, light, grinding noises for about five seconds that seemed to originate from underneath my condominium and then BOOM–a loud noise and my condo shook very noticeably for about one second.

I immediately jumped out of my chair and went outside on my balconey. There was not a cloud in the sky nor a breath of wind. And there were no neighbors walking out of their houses to question what had just happened. I wondered if I was the only person who experienced that. So I went back to reading.

Twenty minutes later the same thing happenned again, only not quite the intensity as the previous one. Both times I thought of an earthquake. I’ve been in earthquakes, and I thought this was very similar. But an earthquake in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I now live. IMPOSSIBLE. Or is it?

I was born and reared in Seattle, Washington. On April 13, 1949, at 11:55 PM I was seven years and standing in my backyard. It was lovely sunny spring day. All of a sudden the ground started wobbling up and down in waves, like one quick ocean wave following after another one. I was thinking that whatever it was, it might make me fall over. So I sat down on my lawn and kept watching this amazing phenomenon. The road and sidewalk beside my house was moving up and down at what seemed like at least two or three feet high waves for a few seconds. Then it just stopped. I thought, “what in the world was that?”

It was an EARTHQUAKE! It measured 7.1 magnitude on the Richter scale. It was the largest earthquake ever experienced in the Puget Sound area by the white man since he settled there. This earthquake was centered in the nearby Qlympia-Tacoma area of Western Washington. Yet the ground shook for thirty seconds over a 230,000 square-mile area, affecting most of the Pacific Northwest. Eight people were killed and dozens were injured. Most of the damage occurred in Seattle and southward to Chehalis, eighty miles away. Hundreds of buildings were damaged and thousands of brick chimneys fell down. In Seattle (according to http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?displaypage=output.cfm&file_id=2063), 1900 brick walls collapsed, fractured, or bulged. In countless houses, items on shelves toppled over.

One night during the late 1970s my wife and I were asleep in a bed in an upper floor of a high-rise hotel in Tokyo, Japan. Suddenly, the bed shook and it woke me up. I said to Marilyn, who was still asleep, “Heh, quit shaking the bed.” She awoke groggily and said, “I’m not shaking the bed.” So I said, “Then that must have been an earthquake.” A few minutes later it happened again. This time I could tell that the building was swaying back back and forth. That’s scary! Laying down on the ground when I was seven years old and watching a concrete road and sidewalk moving up and down like ocean waves was KOOL, man; but swaying back and forth in a high-rise building in Japan–a nortorious place in the world for lots of earthquakes–is SCARY!

Wherever you live, people think of the chances of natural disasters happening there. When I lived in metro-Houston, Texas, for nearly forty years, we always thought of three natural disasters that could TAKE US OUT! It was hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Earthquakes–fuggetaboutit. No chance. And those of us who live in metro-Phoenix, Arizona, we only worry about one thing–the blazing SUNSHINE. Houston in the summertime is a wet sauna; but this Sonora Desert of Arizona in the summertime is an OVEN. Earthquakes? Same as Houston–no chance.

That’s what I thought until this morning when I saw a news flash on this computer on which I’m writing. It says that at exactly 11:30 PM last night there was a 4.1 magnitude EARTHQUAKE here in metro-Phoenix. WOW! And there’s no fracking going on around here to drill some petro-dollars out of the ground like in Texas and Oklahoma that is shaking their ground. Now, I guess, we have two natural disasters to worry about in Arizona–heat/drought and earthquakes. I’ll be glad when we get to heaven.

BTW, is that where we’re going? That’s a subject for another time.