[bd476]

Alia wrote: "Very apt for you to include the Lucy Jones material in this thread."

Thank you Alia.

Alia wrote: "I was a distance from Northridge, and Northridge was yet quite an experience."

I was not far enough away from Northridge and also was sitting on a previously unknown fault line. I'm pretty sure I'm repeating myself here but on my block nine buildings came down that day. We were slammed from the Northridge quake then slammed again because of the independent earthquake in the previously undetected fault line.

Miraculously only the inside contents of my apartment were tossed around or destroyed, not the building itself. Next door, the walls went from vertical to horizontal and the floors buckled upwards into a point.

Two doors down from my building, another building instantly converted from being a three story building into a two story building. Thank God no one was home in the first floor apartment.

After the earthquake, if I hadn't known that there were three stories in that building prior to the quake, it would have been very difficult to see where the first floor used to be. The first floor was flattened down so much that only the second story apartment seemed to be half-way lowered into the subterranean parking garage.

[Alia]

Really shakes ya' up don't it? Northridge was a 6.7 but the ground acceleration was the highest ever recorded in urban America. 1989 Loma Prieta was much, much closer to me. A 6.9, and lasted 15 seconds. I was on the phone with a friend about 40 minutes drive away, who'd just moved "here" from Chicago, when the quake hit, and on my way with a puke pan for one of my kids with the flu. It hit, I remember yelling into the phone "quake!", about 30 seconds later, my friend was yelling into the phone back at me that she was NOW experiencing the quake too.

Lucy Jones: suggesting a quake to last 100 seconds.

After Loma Prieta, I discovered I disliked the aftershocks more than the quake. Would it get bigger or were the aftershocks getting smaller...