five years ago

today marks five years since the 6.8 earthquake in seattle. i was living in seattle at the time and that earthquake was one of the reasons jeff and i moved back east (not the only reason, but one of many. the ground doesn't move so much on the east coast.)

i was at work that day, but not in our office. we were having an off-site meeting at safeco field - the baseball stadium. they rented out suites and rooms in the off season. it was supposed to be three days of meetings, figuring out how to create a professional services department at the web company i worked out.

i remember zoning out at one point when a train went by the stadium. the building rumbled a little bit and i remember thinking (in fact, i will never forget), "i think that's how i would describe an earthquake to someone who has never been in one. it feels like a train rumbling by." i had been through a few small quakes in the 5 years i lived in seattle - all minor. they were exciting and i liked telling my family and friends back east that yeah, i'd been through a few earthquakes and they were no big deal.

but this earthquake was different. the director of our department was droning on about the RUP process when the floor started swaying. when an earthquake strikes, there is always a second or two of complete silence before everyone realizes what is happening and starts yelling. all of us in the room were silent and then people started diving under tables and ducking under doorways.

most of the earthquakes i'd been in lasted no more than a few seconds. a little shaking and it was over. not this one. official reports say it lasted 45 seconds but it felt like minutes.

years.

an eternity.

and then it was over and my co-workers and i rushed, dazed and scared, out of the stadium into the parking lot where we stood among every other dazed and scared person in seattle.

i hopped on a bus to go home but a half an hour later when the bus still hadn't moved, i got off and walked the three miles home. i remember calling my mom on my cell phone. she didn't know there had been an earthquake so when i told her i was fine and not to worry, she immediately panicked.

when i got home, i thought our hillside condo had escaped unscathed. until i walked into the guest bedroom and saw the water from the hot water heater that had fallen over. later that night, jeff and i walked around the condo looking at cracks in the walls and putting our belongings back on shelves. we found the cats a few hours later jammed - literally wedged- under our bed which we thought was so packed with quilts and old frames and boxes of junk that they wouldn't be able to fit under there.

it took us weeks to get over the earthquake. we talked about it constantly: where we were, what we were doing when it struck, what we did after it was over...we still talk about it, but not as a way to chase our fears away.

we laugh that jeff, who was surgically attached to his cell phone, forgot to bring it to work that day of all days.

we laugh about bringing the onsite maintenance guy a few 6 packs of beer when we told him about our water damage (bribe. kind gesture. call it what you will. it's all the same when you've got water in your house).

we laugh about the $1500 assessment the condo board levied for roof damage that we didn't know about when we sold our condo (we were supposed to read the minutes from the meeting? puh-lease. who does that?) and the legal action the woman who bought our condo threatened us with when she found out about it (seriously - it was an honest mistake. we had no clue about the assessment. and shouldn't her realtor have known about that anyway?)

but mostly we heave a sigh of relief that we don't have to worry about earthquakes any more.



(this picture was taken from one of the suites we were in. this was our view when the earthquake struck. i will never, ever forget that yellow foul ball pole swaying from side to side looking like it was going to touch the ground and break in two.)