Glad to hear your surviving. Funny I re read my email to you asking you if you had power…. Duh, like would you be reading it if you didn’t. Funny how we become so dependent on things like power, heat, the internet, and our devices and don’t think about their absence. Good at least you had backup power. We don’t, but then our storms are generally not that severe. All we have is earthquakes. Which reminds me of our last big one, the Nisqually earthquake. Happened 25 years ago to almost the day. It actually happened on the 28th of February 2001. It was when I purchased this house. Carter was in town, as he had not yet moved from DC. We were to have our first walk through with the previous owners and Carter would get his first viewing. I was at my studio with my assistant Connie. Carter was at my co-op down the street. The quake hit around 11:00. I had felt earthquakes before and knew the feeling. Connie and Carter had not. Usually, they are small little rumbles. This one wasn’t. When it first hit, Connie goes what’s that? Earthquake I say, and a minute later it’s still rumbling and I say bad earthquake, let’s get out of here. My co-op, being an old building was shaking, and Carter was freaking out thinking he was going to die. The old building was pretty solid, so it just made a lot of noise and things slid off my shelves. When it stopped, I called Carter to see how he was doing. Kind of shaken but alive. Our house appointment was at 11:30, so I picked up Carter and we went for a visit. The owner was just finishing his inspection of the house to see what might be broken. Nothing to speak of. It felt good I had just bought a solid house. What we didn’t see was the damage to the chimney and a year later we had to have it rebuilt. In general, there was not much damage around town except in Pioneer Square where all the buildings are old and not quake proof. A lot of bricks fell and damaged a few cars. The media grabbed on to that and made it look like the whole city was in ruins. That was the last major quake here. It was the main reason the city accelerated the replacement of the viaduct which ran along the waterfront. It was the same design as the viaduct in Oakland, Ca that collapsed in the quake of 1989. Were you in San Fran then? Oddly enough I watched that quake unfold in real time. I was watching the world series when Al Michaels reports we have a bit of a problem here… A strange live, in the moment thing.
