The Quake Pod

I was sitting in my magic floating office pod when there was a very explosive and intense jolt – I felt a big shock / compression wave burst through the house (and me).  Everything shook and rattled.  It was powerful and incredibly jarring.  Then, for a very short duration – maybe three seconds – there was major shaking; the house and its components made noises that I do not wish to hear again.  I made it out of the pod and up against one of the core beams of the house within that time, and waited a few seconds.  I looked out one of the small windows and the trees and telephone poles were visibly swaying.  There were several more seconds of diminishing wavey motion, underscored by the oddest, deepest, almost-soundless roaring I’ve ever heard.  Like the world’s biggest subwoofer turned way up, but without any actual music.

I stayed where I was for a bit, then checked around the house.  Pictures on the walls are moved, a few things fell over, but there’s no visible damage.

To find out that the quake was a puny 3.4 was also jarring.  A 3.4 felt like that?  I must be a serious rookie.  Virgin in the ways of earth-quaking.  Really new and gone all wimpy-Maine-kid on these nerves-of-steel Californians. But then I found out it was centered about 800 meters from my house.

So I grabbed the camera and zipped down to the epicenter – the end of Venice Boulevard where it meets Pacific Avenue – to see if there was anything up.  Everything looked normal; no sign of damage or anything.  I walked the canal area for a bit; chatted with some people at Canal Club [literally at the epicenter].  Fuck yeah we felt it, the staff said, that was crazy.  I talked with a girl who lives at Venice and Canal Street, and she said it was the biggest one she’d felt in her life, and she thought someone crashed into her house.  Everyone was buzzing about it down there.  This helped me feel a bit less wimpy.

Then I checked the Richter Scale article at Wikipedia and found that the approximate “energy yield” of a 3.5 is 747 gigajoules, or about the same shock wave as detonating 178 tons of TNT.  Put another way, that’s a quarter the yield of a small atomic bomb.

Whoa.

Nearby, Xeni had a similar reaction.

The pod is also where Deanna was sitting when we had the rolly-quake last summer.  She found that to be a unique experience.  So, I’ve redubbed it The Quake Pod, and don’t plan on going back in there tonight.

Courtesy: US Geological Survey

But, since I live in Venice, within what the city calls a “Tsunami Red Zone,” I thought it would be cool to know if there was any kind of tsunami warning.  Luckily I had power and an internet connection, because I quickly ascertained (via various news sources) that there was no such warning.

Digging deeper, I realized I had no way to know this had I been without power, or dead asleep, or driving, or under any other circumstance less than ideal for receiving that kind of urgent warning, where 30-60 seconds of extra time could clearly make the difference between life and death.

I surfed the City of Los Angeles’ Emergency Management Web site, wondering if there was some way I could sign up for alerts of any kind.  Nothing.  I called them a few days later.  No, sir, we don’t have a system like that in place, I’m afraid. The lady I spoke with quickly volunteered, “but neither does New York City,” as if that would somehow make me feel better.

How hard could it be to implement something like this? I realize it’s probably much more difficult than whiners like me would make it out to be, but there must be a solution. It was very hard to get a cell phone call (in or out) in the aftermath of the quake, so maybe this would put more pressure on already-strained infrastructure. Although I’m not a Verizon customer, I found it disturbing – and revealing – when Verizon spokesperson Ken Muche told cNet that their quake call volume was “about 40 percent higher than our projections of what we might experience in a natural disaster.” Then, Ken: please adjust your projections.

If I’m asleep at 0230 and there’s a tsunami warning, I’d like to be awakened.  Ideally that means my phone rings, but really anything that gets my sorry ass moving would be welcome.

I checked my AT&T wireless bill.  I pay $17 per month in taxes, and $12 of it goes directly to the City of Los Angeles.  I’d really love to know where this $12 is going, and if we might direct a bit of it toward something as critical as this.

Or, technologists: maybe we can talk about ways to solve the problem directly, and fuggetabout the damn telcos.  Ideas?