April 29, 2008

Safe and sound in southern California while Indiana shakesSafe and sound in southern California while Indiana shakes

When my cell phone rang at 3:42 a.m. Friday, April 18, the first thought — no, fear — that entered my mind was that something had happened with one of my students.

I and another teacher had left two days earlier with a group of five students for sunny southern California to attend an annual journalism convention. We were all staying in the same hotel, on the same floor, just across the hall from each other, and everyone had gone to bed that night around 11 with the understanding no one should leave the hotel until the next morning when we met downstairs for breakfast. The students traveling with us were great and I wasn’t concerned at all about them getting into mischief.

But as the default Verizon tones started sounding from the Motorola RAZR sitting next to the hotel bed, I feared something had happened or someone was sick.

Half asleep, I started grabbing for the phone, finally getting my hands on it and looking at the caller ID: Mom cell, it said as it continued to ring so loudly.

A nanosecond of relief eased my early morning sudden awakening but then I wondered why is my mom calling me at 3:42 a.m.

“Justin, you’re not going to believe this, but there’s been an earthquake,” she said.

I don’t think I said anything for a few seconds as I tried to understand what she had just said at 3:42 on an early Friday morning. My immediate, logical reaction was that an earthquake had hit southern California and that I had somehow slept right through it.

I had a quick flashback to a moment earlier in the week after one of my colleagues at school learned I would be taking a group of students to California. She quickly pointed out that just that week she had heard on the news that a “strong” and “deadly” earthquake was expected to hit on one of California’s big seismic faults within the next 30 years with a magnitude of at least 6.7. Why is she telling me this, I wondered?

There must have been an earthquake in California, I thought as the short moment of silence filled the phone after my mom’s surprising news woke me from a deep sleep.

“An earthquake? Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, “but everyone here is OK. I just talked with your aunt and she said it was worse in Indianapolis.”

I was a little confused. Keep in mind, it was 3:42 a.m., so I wasn’t thinking as clearly as normal.

My mom began to explain, but I almost didn’t believe her because we don’t get earthquakes in Indiana, or so I thought. I flipped the TV on to CNN as she was talking, and surely enough they were showing clips from a newscast that was in progress when the quake hit. The anchors from the Indiana TV station were clearly caught off guard as they were reading the news when the ground suddenly started shaking.

After a minute or so, I said I’d call back in the morning California time (there is a three hour difference between Bluffton and California).

Needless to say, by the time we met for breakfast that morning, all the students had received similar phone calls (although not at 3:42 a.m.) and none of us could believe we had traveled almost 2,000 to earthquake central to find out that an earthquake of 5.2 on the Richter scale had shaken our neck of the woods and had been felt in parts of 16 states.

After reading an article online from Science Daily, I was surprised to learn that our neighbor to the east, Ohio, has its fair share of faults.

In an interview with a professor in the Department of Geology in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, the article reported that since 1776, 170 earthquakes have been recorded in Ohio of magnitude 2.0 or greater. Nearly that many have also been charted with a magnitude of 2.0 or below.

I didn’t know that, I thought, as I read the article online.

It’s still weird to think Indiana felt an earthquake as we were sleeping in southern California. It seems it should be the other way around, but I’m not complaining.

By the way, if you’ve never visited Anaheim and Orange County, it’s another beautiful place waiting to be explored. Whether you want to visit Mickey and Minnie ($66 for an adult for one day, by the way), spend some time on near-by beaches, enjoy the perfect climate or just about anything else, southern California has it all.

Don’t let the threat of a major earthquake in the next 30 years scare you. The state is not going to fall into the ocean and who knows, maybe Indiana will experience another one before California does!

--JUSTIN PEEPER

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