What We DON'T Miss!

When I came home tonight Joe informed that there was an earthquake in Southern California, today. Just over the mountain from my parents. It actually happened this morning but I was unaware of it as I did not watch the news today. Joe called my parents and they are okay, but definitely felt the quake. In this article from the LA Times it talks about how this was the largest in the area since the magnitude 5.9 Whittier Narrows quake in 1987 in Rosemead. And how this one is a reminder of how there is still the possibility of "a big one." This scares me. This is what we (Joe and I) don't miss. We don't miss being woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of the earth shaking and the ground underneath you moving. It's not a very fun thing to experience. It has been a very long time since I have felt a earthquake, probably since 1999 or 1998 when we moved to Virginia.

This map shows you just how close the epicenter was to my parents house. The epicenter was in Chino Hills, where the blue balloon is. My parents live to the South East of there, in Lake Elsinore. Their town is almost at the very bottom right of the map.

Now while you're looking at the map look almost directly to the left of Chino Hills for a city called Whitter. That is the city where the 1987 Whitter Narrows (duh, Jamie) earthquake was centered. As I mentioned it above. I am only mentioning it again because of all the earthquakes that I felt in the 22 years that I lived in Cali, that is the one that I remember most.


View Larger Map

As I said earlier it took place in 1987, I was only 10 years old. But I remember this day so distinctly. I did have to look up the exact date which was October 1st. I was in the fifth grade and I was at school at it was early in the morning. I don't think we had been at school for very long yet that morning. I remember feeling the ground moving, the screams of everyone in the classroom, and hiding under my desk. We spent most of the day outside of our classroom. We had just moved a few months earlier from Whitter to Lake Elsinore. I think it was a God send that we moved when we did because where we did live was hit pretty hard. Our old house was right in the middle of the epicenter. In Lake Elsinore we were about 50 minutes from the epicenter. Had we still been in Whitter, things would have been much different for my family. My school had a ton of damaged sections that were unrecognizable. Our little downtown was completely destroyed. Our old house even had some pretty good damage done to it. Again Thank God, we moved when we did. October 1st, 1987 is a day I will never forget. If you haven't ever felt an earthquake you're lucky. Just another reason on our list of reasons why it was okay to leave California. Earthquakes are something we don't miss at all. But I (we) sure do miss you, Mom and Dad, and of course the rest of our family and friends that are still there. I hope that the USGS is wrong this time about another "big one" coming. We are glad that every one is okay.