Woke up to an earth quake this a.m. in IL!

4.3 is nothing. Unless the epicenter is right in your neighborhood, it feels like a big truck went by too fast. We have those all the time in California and nobody even notices.

We just had a couple of sixes offshore of Humboldt County, about 25 miles southwest of Eureka, and the damage came out to an average of something like $500 per household.

The stores are always the worst hit, because everything ends up on the floor. A few people had houses on piers instead of foundations and they had some major trouble, but geeze that's an awfully foolish way to build a house in earthquake country and I can't imagine why anybody would buy one without retrofitting.

We went through all the big L.A. quakes of the past 50 years and only lost some glass collectibles. That's why we started collecting teddy bears; they just bounce.

Our furniture is all cabled to the wall and our tschotschkes are all sticky-waxed to their shelves and tabletops. And the house is full of teddy bears.

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Our dogs always start barking and our parrots always start going berserk about fifteen seconds before they hit, but that's just not enough time to do anything.

 

Meanwhile I'm working out here in Washington and we just had a 100-year snowstorm. The place is utterly paralyzed.

Some areas lost power for more than 24 hours. People were firing up gasoline-powered generators... wait for it... indoors. I guess it's true that you just can't fix stupid.

Miraculously none of those people died, but three people in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs died in their cars, sitting there with the engine running and the heater blowing. They hadn't driven out of their parking spaces and they didn't realize that their exhaust pipes were blocked by snow. I have to say I feel sorry for those people. That would not happen to me because I'm both a former future scientist and a car buff so I know to check it first. But I can understand the average person not even thinking of it. (Public service announcement to all of my dear friends here so it doesn't happen to you.

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)

 

What mystifies me about that is this:
Couldn't they smell the fumes from the unburned petrol blowing into the car?

 

Los Angeles is a huge city. I was thirty miles from the Sylmar quake and from the Northridge quake twenty years later, and I barely felt them. I was closer to the Whittier quake, maybe twenty miles, and we loss some glassware.

Actually my wife was home and I was out driving. I thought I'd run over a rock or something like that.

 

I'm sure the last time that happened was at least 800 years ago, before the Aztecs left California and migrated to Mexico.

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I've lived in California for 50 years and the closest the snowline on the south side of the San Gabriels has come to L.A. is a tenth of an inch of snow on the northern fringe of the Altadena foothills.

 

Yes indeed. Even though I'm from L.A. I am (or was) a skier so I've spent plenty of time driving in deep snow. We just had a hundred-year snowstorm here in Washington, which is basically the equivalent of a good snow day at Mammoth Mountain. People are afraid to drive, and those who do drive have no idea what they're doing and give the others good reason for their fear. We skiers call them all "snow wimps."

 

Maybe they fell asleep. Everyone here is utterly exhausted from dealing with this hundred-year snowfall. Even people from cities like Buffalo that get a lot of snow, say they don't get this much at one time. The last snow was over a week ago, and the drifts are still so deep that they haven't got any place to pile the snow they clear from the roads and sidewalks. They have to truck it out and the municipal governments just don't have that kind of equipment. Small neighborhood roads still have only one driveable lane and even in urban centers people have to walk in the street because the sidewalks are three feet deep.

The buses are running about every 45 minutes, and for several days the Metro was only serving underground stations because they couldn't get the tracks clear out in the suburbs where they run above ground.