Because really, 'natural disaster' is not what we're dealing with.
Yes, I felt the earthquake. It was me and the one other ex-west-coastie in the office who realized what that was first. It was quite unmistakable in this unreinforced brick-building. The ground just picked us up and dropped us a few times, the kind of motion a building like this just wasn't designed to handle. Some existing damage to the building may have gotten worse. There was a lot of brick dust thanks to the wood rafters dancing around. That's it.
At home we had two casualties. A drinking glass shook itself off a shelf and took a diver, breaking. And a mason-jar leaned against a cabinet door, so when I opened it last night it fell at me, requiring me to parry it into a metal popcorn bowl (loud!) and causing a large bruise on my left middle finger.
And we have a hurricane heading our way.
I'm not worried about the hurricane. On its current track, if we DO get a dead-center hit the eye will have tracked across 300-400 miles of land and will be significantly weakened ("tropical depression"). Far more likely is a glancing blow where it spins off the coast. Irene is a big storm so we would just get some of the western rain-bands. From what I hear, this'll be a lot like the big Winter rain-storms the PacNW gets, so nothing I haven't lived through before.
Yes, I felt the earthquake. It was me and the one other ex-west-coastie in the office who realized what that was first. It was quite unmistakable in this unreinforced brick-building. The ground just picked us up and dropped us a few times, the kind of motion a building like this just wasn't designed to handle. Some existing damage to the building may have gotten worse. There was a lot of brick dust thanks to the wood rafters dancing around. That's it.
At home we had two casualties. A drinking glass shook itself off a shelf and took a diver, breaking. And a mason-jar leaned against a cabinet door, so when I opened it last night it fell at me, requiring me to parry it into a metal popcorn bowl (loud!) and causing a large bruise on my left middle finger.
And we have a hurricane heading our way.
I'm not worried about the hurricane. On its current track, if we DO get a dead-center hit the eye will have tracked across 300-400 miles of land and will be significantly weakened ("tropical depression"). Far more likely is a glancing blow where it spins off the coast. Irene is a big storm so we would just get some of the western rain-bands. From what I hear, this'll be a lot like the big Winter rain-storms the PacNW gets, so nothing I haven't lived through before.
The power around here is not as stable as it may be out west in severe wet weather. Make sure you have all your power supply backups available and ready to go....
Not where I was. During the Winter storms we regularly lost power. Bellingham's power-lines run through some tree-heavy corridors, so blow-down knocked out our power quite frequently. It was SOP when expecting heavy weather to be sure one of us was in rapid-reaction range for the night/weekend just in case.
Our colo has already notified us that they're all good. The office kit is another story, though.
Yeah, you may want to put a tarp over that crack in the wall....