Earthquake

By Vince Basehart

August 1 -- “It’s a five, five-point-three, and it’s far away,” says Michael, the intern.

The Lens’ co-workers are providing real-time color commentary on this week’s earthquake, as Santa Monica Boulevard undulates beneath us like a big flag on the Fourth of July.

“It’s a roller, not a shaker,” says the computer guy, as the blinds in the conference room bang inside the metal window frame, and the whole, giant creaking office building continues doing the hula for about twenty seconds.

We Santa Monicans do more than take these temblors in stride. Nonchalance in the face of seismic activity is a point of pride. We are earthquake connoisseurs.

Just a moment ago all of us had been listening to a Power Point presentation, delivered by a hard driving, no-nonsense business woman, the kind who, if she had lived in the ‘40s, would have been described as having “moxie.”

Then the colored pie chart she is projecting on the screen starts to dance. With the first tectonic spasms the woman becomes an ashen, trembling, teary-eyed waif.

“Are you alright?,” asks our lab technician, another unfazed Santa Monican, while the building continues to imitate Jell-O.

This is, after all, just an earthquake, the release of stored elastic strain energy driving fracture propagation along a fault plane, most likely of the classic strike-slip variety by the feel of it.

“I’m from Philly,” the terrified woman explains.

“Oh,” we all acknowledge in unison, nodding our heads sympathetically.

“Don’t worry,” our accountant soothes. “The chances of this being the pre-cursor of a much larger quake are actually quite slim.”

Five minutes later the business woman from Philly is still in the ladies’ room.

We overhear someone outside of the conference room announce, “It was a five point three. Chino.”

“Nailed it!,” exclaims Michael the intern, triumphantly.

By noon we’re all trading earthquake stories around the conference table over catered sandwiches.

“Yeah, Northridge knocked me out of bed.”

“I was on the toilet when Whittier hit.”

“Santa Monica’s not on bedrock, see, so you really feel it here. We’re built mostly on sand.”

“I’ll never forget Northridge.”

“You’re not really supposed to stand in the doorway any more. There’s this guy who rescued people in the Mexico City earthquake, and he says you’re supposed to lay next to your desk. It’s called the triangle of life. Otherwise you just get squashed.”

The business woman from Philly looks a bit sick.

There is inevitable talk about the “Big One,” the apocalyptic quake which is supposed to flatten the LA Basin like the Hulk sitting on a bag of potato chips.

“I don’t suppose there’s any kind of tsunami warning, huh?,” asks the computer guy.

This doesn’t sit well with the business woman from Philly, who stops in mid-chew to contemplate a wall of Pacific Ocean carving a path up the street.

A few hours after the earthquake, the business woman from Philly has finished her presentation and can smile about it now. As she packs up her laptop she says, “I guess I’ll always have my California earthquake story. But I’ll still take a tornado any day.”

She’s heading to LAX, back to Philly where the ground doesn’t shake.

Ask Kate Hutton, the Cal Tech seismologist who shows up on the TV moments after any Southern California tremor, and she will remind us that any place in the world can have an earthquake.

There are rifts and faults all across the earth’s surface, each which could rumble and shudder at a moment’s notice. But quakes are so very…Californian. They are our birthright.

So is electricity. Just as the business woman from Philly gets on the elevator and the doors close, we all hear a whoomp followed by a boom! A transformer has blown and all the power goes out. Shouts of panic are heard throughout the office suite.

The business woman from Philly will be stuck in the elevator for the next hour.