The Earthquake I Lived Through

On October 1, 1987 at 7:42 AM, my husband dropped our television on the floor in the living room.  I was putting on my make up in front of the mirror in our bedroom.  I couldn’t imagine why he was moving the television.  I thought he was in the kitchen eating breakfast.  When my mirror started shaking, I knew that he was nowhere near the TV.  We were having an earthquake.

Having moved to Los Angeles in 1982, I had experienced several small quakes, but nothing like this one.  We knew it was a big one.  The entire house started rocking back and forth.  We quickly exited the house and waited.  What seemed like forever was probably more like a minute.  We were speechless and numb.

After the rumbling ceased, we didn’t know if it was safe to go back in the house or not.  When we finally did, we saw lots of cracks in the walls.  We didn’t know how much damage had been done structurally.  Many of our belongings had fallen on the floor, but our main concern was the structural integrity of the house.  We had just purchased it the previous year, our first house, and put a ton of work into this fixer-upper. 

Neither of us went to work that day.  We spent the next few hours talking to neighbors, discussing what happened, and listening to the news.  The quake measured 6.0 with the epicenter only 12 miles from our house, which is why we felt it so strongly.  The noise I thought was Chris dropping the TV was the sound of the earth moving.  There was nothing else I could have equated that noise to other than that. 

Three days later, sitting at my desk on the third floor in Culver City, a 5.6 aftershock hit.  We all felt it and rode it out.  Luckily there was no significant damage to the building or anyone in it.  Watching tall strong buildings sway and rock is quite a scary thing. 

We had to go through the proper channels to get someone to come check out our house.  Thankfully the damage was all cosmetic and not structural.  We patched up the walls and went on with our life. 

Six months later, our first son was born.  A year and a half after that we moved back east.  It was a tough decision to make because we had wonderful friends there, loved being so close to the beautiful blue Pacific and loved the landscape of the west.  But in the end, family and land without earthquakes won out.  As we were driving cross-country in October of 1989, we heard on the news that there was a 6.9 earthquake up near San Francisco.  We took that as a sign that we made the right decision.