April Showers, Part I: Earthquakes and such

It is raining outside. The sound of thunder has been rumbling in the sky for the past half an hour or so. No lightning yet, but it may well be on its way. Oops…spoke too soon; just saw the first flash. I am glad I got my morning run in early today. This kind of weather unsettles me a bit. Where I am from we are lucky to hear thunder once a summer. That’s not to say that it never storms in Alaska. In fact, lightning sets off wildfires a lot in the interior part of the state. But I live in the South Central. I guess that’s the breaks of living in a state that is really six or seven states all rolled into one.
But I don’t think thunder and lightning unsettles me more than earthquakes “shake up (no pun intended)” Midwesterners. Really, I don’t think any of you “scaredy cats” have anything to worry about. One of my good friends at the LCMS seminary in Ft. Wayne was born and raised in Los Angles…just a hair’s width from the infamous San Andreas fault line. He lived through the quake in 1994 which shook somewhere about eight point something on the Richter Scale.
Time to go off on a tangent here. For those that don’t know how the Richter Scale works, each whole-number increase stands for a tenfold increase in power released by the quake. Thus, a quake that registers 2.5 on the scale is 10 times as powerful as one that registers 1.5. One that registers 3.5 is 100 times as powerful, one that registers 4.5 is 1000 times as powerful, and so on.
So the quake that Dave, my friend at sem, lived through was about a 1000 times as powerful as the quake that rattled our dishes a few weeks ago. It caused significant damage to buildings that were designed to resistant that kind of motion. And the quake lasted for a full 45 seconds. I don’t think the quake here lasted much more than 15 or 20 seconds.
But both of these quakes pail in comparison to the quake that shook AK (Alaska) on March 27, 1964. My dad was a seven year-old boy playing outside when the quake tore through the South Central part of the state. It was about 5:30 in the afternoon on a Friday. He says he remembers the earth buckling and throwing him to the ground and that he couldn’t regain his balance for some time afterwards. He recalls the earth rolling in waves like the ocean does.
In reality the quake lasted about five, terrifying minutes (300 hundred seconds of not being able to move, pinned to the rolling ground). For the beginning and end of the quake it registered about 8.6 on the Richter Scale. But for an entire minute, the Earth shook at 9.2 on the Richter scale, nearly 10,000 times the power released by the Midwest quake a few weeks ago. To put the power of the quake into real perspective it pushed the Matanuska-Susitna Valley 500 ft wider than it had been before. That’s right folks, it took the Alaska Mountain Range (a far northern branch of the Rocky Mountains), and spread it a tenth of a mile wider than it was. Seams small, but were are talking about literally moving mountains!! To make that picture a little more see-able it would have moved about half the Chicago skyline into Lake Michigan. Damage from the tsunamis produced by the quake was reported as far south as CHILE…that’s half the world away in South America!!!
Even more eerie was that fact that this particular Friday was Good Friday. A grim reminder of when the Savior of the Nations hung on a cross on a Friday afternoon. And when he cried out, as He who knew no sin, became sin for us, the Earth shook.
So the next time I hear someone in the Midwest talk about the quake, I might go off the deep end. It wasn’t an earthquake people…it was a dish rattler.
By the way…is that the sun coming out?