earthquake update

Bryan and James shoveling liquefaction from our driveway

So this Tuesday was supposed to be a fairly quiet day - Bryan had gone down to the church to help with a BBQ that we were putting on for the students of Vision College, next door to our church, and I slept in, lounging around in my pajamas until lunchtime. I was trying to talk myself into heading down to the library to do more job searching, but a good book about Scott's Discovery voyage to the Antarctic kept my inside - which turned out to be particularly fortunate on this day.

Just before 1 PM, as I was still in my second-floor bedroom, engrossed in my book, we experienced an aftershock that was particularly startling and felt even more severe than the original earthquake that we experienced in September. I could hear things crashing to the floor downstairs and darted to my earthquake position in the doorway, feeling only slighly more prepared than last year. Though I was immediately able to get a call through to Bryan and knew that he and others with him were all right, I started walking down to the church right away. There's something helpful about being able to see others and share the experience with them that outweighed the potential dangers of leaving the house.

Everyone was out on the streets, and as I got closer to the city I started meeting people who had walked up from the city center. One man told me that he'd been in a conference in the Town Hall when the floor split in two. I passed a corner pharmacy that had suffered minor damage during the last quake and moved to a new location; good thing, too, because the second floor had completely collapsed in on the bottom floor where their store had been, leaving interior hallways and doors exposed for all to see.

At the church I discovered that a 30-ft wall looming over their BBQ spot had partially collapsed just as they were about to start, and a few people had been snatched away from the wall by friends as it began to fall. No one there was hurt, but some friends hadn't yet been able to locate family and were becoming more and more distraught, not sure if their phone's silence meant that their family members were caught in the rubble or simply that the cell phone network wasn't working properly. Finding nothing to do at the church itself, I drove a friend in this situation towards her house on the east side of town, not sure if we could get through but determined to find out if her house, which had been damaged in the last quake, was still standing and if her mom was there. We finally abandoned the car a mile or two from the church after 45 minutes in stand-still traffic, and walked the final mile along roads buckled with pressure and clotted with liquefaction, soil that's been compressed by the pressure and turns to mud, which seeps up through the cracks and holes that are available to it. Fortunately, we found her family safe and well, though their house has moved off of its foundations and they've since moved in with family in other parts of town.

Knowing the traffic to be impossible and expecting the buses not to be running (I had since heard of buses having been crushed by falling buildings in the city), I headed off on foot towards my home, 3 or 4 miles west, at some points finding the streets underwater to knee-level. Most of the homes I saw in this area seemed to be in good condition, as some of the most fragile ones had come down last September and almost none of the chimneys had yet been replaced after their tumbles from last year. I arrived home to find our small back pation area covered with inches of liquefaction, a stream of water running through from an outlet I couldn't pinpoint and slowly filling the area even more.

Throughout the afternoon and evening we sat glued to the TV, amazed at the difference in damage compared to the last earthquake, which was larger on the magnitude scale (7.1 compared to a 6.3) but, being farther from the city center, shallower, and occurring overnight, didn't result in anything near what we were seeing this time around. We had power but not water, and dutifully set out every large pot and unbroken bowl onto our balcony to collect the rain that was now starting to come down.

More later.

-Rachel