The Earthquake Experience

There is a macabre fascination for a disaster. While for me personally, the earthquake of Friday, November 30, 2018 was not a disaster, for some it truly has been. Beverly had just left the house with three of our grandchildren who we have been tending while their parents are out of town. She was taking them to meet up with a carpool. I had fed the kids breakfast and was getting ready to go into the garage to work on some Christmas presents. I stood between the living room and the dining room when the house began to shake.

We are not unused to earthquakes here. We have tremors, and more severe, all the time. After a few seconds, I could tell that this was not of the normal sort. The earthquake hit hard with a single pulse and then persisted for maybe 30 seconds. As I stood there, several thoughts were tumbling around in my head. This is bigger than normal. It might be a 7. I guess we find out if having the home designer plan for 100 mph winds and seismic occurrence was worth it. Listen to the glass breaking. Maybe I should get out from under this big beam.

I went to the front door and opened it. Standing in the doorway, the shaking stopped. I stood there a minute, then came back in and closed the door. I walked back to the living room, looking up at the tall ceiling and all the exposed beams. We had just finished decorating for Christmas and the 20 foot tall Christmas tree was overlooking the valley below us, placidly waving as if blown by a breeze. The floor was littered with the stocking hangars that we have treasured since the kids were little, 7 of the 8 having fallen off the 10 foot high beams they were sitting on.

The electricity had flashed off, then on, then finally and definitively off during the quake, but the sky was lightening and seeing wasn’t a problem. I started to walk around when-6 minutes after the first shock- the world started shaking again with the first and biggest of the aftershocks. The earthquake had indeed been a 7.0, and the first aftershock was rated at 5.8 on the Richter scale. Each number increase on the scale reflects a 10-fold increase in wave magnitude, so the initial quake was roughly 10 times more severe than the first aftershock.

Beverly called me about then and my new phone was buried on my desk where everything had toppled. I dug it out and answered. She said she was going to take the kids to school, but wasn’t even sure if they would have school. As it turned out, they closed the school and she brought them home, as well as Jennifer’s youngest two, that she picked up at their school.

I pulled out my phone and began to share a video with the family detailing a walkthrough of the house, and before I was done, Beverly was back with the 5 kids. There was glass everywhere except downstairs and I set up a table by the window down there where the gradually lightening sky would illuminate the room first and ordered them to stay downstairs and play a game. That worked for 3 or 4 minutes. They were repeatedly banished to the basement while we began cleaning up the worst of the glass. I picked up the broken stocking hangars and placed all the pieces on the dining room table, then did the same for the angels from over the fireplace.

A glass platter had shattered on the floor in the kitchen. A ceramic charger had broken again after a repair 15 years old, and a vase had fallen out of a cupboard and send shards all over the dining room. Other than that, our first inspection was surprisingly tame. That isn’t to say that there was order; there was not. The kitchen floor was covered with books, canned food and boxes littered the floor in the pantry. The shelf over my desk collapsed and created a great pile that forced me to clean up and throw away.

A second inspection revealed a broken canning jar of beef stew in the basement where hundreds of other jars were stacked on shelves. In the bathroom upstairs a few decorative bottles in the window crashed on the ground. In the bathroom downstairs a mirror behind the sink fell over the counter and broke on the carpet. A few boxes and bins fell off their shelves on the walls of the garage and landed on the concrete floor, but nothing was broken.

On my third inspection this morning (Sunday) I found a cast iron roaster that we had gotten in Germany had toppled from the top shelf and broken.

When we built our house and I was excavating the property, I was scraping away the topsoil to make a flat place on the side of our mountain to build a house. I hit bedrock and could go no deeper. In fact, our house was supposed to be 10 feet shorter, buried in the ground to an extent, but it was not to be. The bedrock forced us to build higher, and we attribute that problem that was resolved 15 years ago with the lack of damage to our house. There was no structural damage, aside from several cracks where drywall joints gapped slightly. Apparently bedrock jolts once, but doesn’t keep waving. Earth piled on bedrock moves until it doesn’t, waving back and forth.

My eldest daughter, who lives down the mountain from us, wasn’t interested in being home alone. She picked up her 2 oldest kids from their schools and they joined the throng in our home. I sent the kids downstairs, condemned to games in the lightening basement. After a while, my eldest son arrived in his truck to get some diesel out of my storage tank that, by that time, was fueling the generator. He filled his truck and then went back to work on his house.

I took Jennifer back to her house where we, lighting the dark corners with headlamps, inspected for damage. The same story prevailed for her. Lots of stuff on the ground and broken glass, but nothing structural that we could see. I crawled under the garage crawlspace to check the water tank and pump and found the PVC pipe between them had broken. I took the pieces and then we left to buy a fitting at the hardware store and check out the office.

There were several vehicles in front of Trustworthy Hardware at the bottom of Eagle River Loop. As I walked in the door and realized it was dark, I turned around to get my headlamp. The owner told me that he wasn’t really open, but was just trying to help people. I went and found the fitting I needed that was marked at 49 cents. I gave him a dollar and he gave me 50 cents change. Pretty great service, if you ask me.

Jennifer and I walked into my office, expecting the worst. Every single chart in both the front office and the hallway to the back was on the floor, not in alphabetical order, but shuffled as if they had been playing cards. The sterilization area was a complete shambles with instruments everywhere. The distiller on the counter had been saved from a fall to the floor by the drawer in front of it having opened and carried its weight. The hallway out of the operatory area into the back was cluttered with debris. The lab door couldn’t be pushed in because nearly everything in the lab from models to supplies was laying on the floor. When I got the door open finally, the machine we make retainers on had also been saved by the drawer beneath it. The lathe and the model trimmer were both laying on the floor in the midst of everything else.

The supply area was a foot deep with debris, and two shelves had fallen over, completely blocking the path to the break room in the back. I made my way across the blockage to find the refrigerator standing open and its entire contents laying on the floor. I filled it back up and closed the door and then climbed back out.

The shelves over the desk in Robert and my office had fallen across the desk and onto the floor, and the shelves opposite the desk were likewise dumped on the ground. The archive room, full of charts and supplies, was (and still is, at this writing) impassable. The water cooler in the patient area was empty and one 5 gallon bottle had rolled free. I mounted it on the stand and we left.

We spent the rest of the day cleaning up at home, fixing Jennifer’s broken pipe, checking on Carolyn’s house, and checking on friends. The electricity had come back on at my house by early afternoon and the place was beginning to look normal. We had picked up and put away-or threw away-most everything that had been displaced. I used 3 tubes of super glue to put together all the broken Christmas treasures and put them back in their accustomed places. The kids had settled in to a Christmas Movie Marathon in the basement, and Jennifer and her kids spent the night as well.

Our neighbors at the end of our road were not as fortunate as we. Their house had been built in the 1960’s on a point overlooking all of Eagle River and Anchorage. They had just bought the house 6 months ago and the damage is catastrophic. It is as if the house began a slide down the hill while the garage remained behind, and I’m afraid rebuilding or abandonment will be their only options. We spoke with them several times during the day as they sat in front of the house wondering what their next step would be. We offered them a place to stay, but they said they’d had several offers. My heart aches for them.

On Friday I told the family and some of the staff that the office would be closed Monday and the staff would put things right, but I was shamed by my inaction and Beverly and I and the office manager showed up about noon and began working. I got the computer system router and music system running and then worked on the sterilization area. All the instruments had to be re-sterilized and everything put away. Robert, Bethany, Hannah, and Winnie showed up about 1:30 and began working in earnest. Robert was in and out with his other responsibilities, but he got the main server, that he had just finished installing that week, up and running.

We worked straight through till about 7PM, and other than our office and the archive room, everything looks pretty normal. Robert noticed that the X-Ray machine had moved enough to tear out a wall brace. It is freestanding, but was bolted to the wall to keep it from moving incidentally. We removed a bent plate from the back and made sure it is in good working condition, and it will be functional until we can move it back 10 inches or so to its normal location.

We plan to see patients as normal Monday morning, so we shouldn’t inconvenience their families, though there are plenty of other things that will likely get in the way of their normal lives.

Traffic has been a mess between Anchorage, Eagle River, and the Valley. Sink holes, collapsed lanes, and compromised bridges have limited traffic to one lane in several places and that will surely be a lingering nightmare for those that have to travel to work or school, but school is cancelled for the whole next week for repairs.

Take Aways from our experience.

1.       We feel truly blessed, though no more deserving than some who have been badly challenged. It is our opportunity to be charitable with them.

2.       Be Prepared is not just the Boy Scout Motto. Having food and energy storage may be incalculably valuable, not just for us, but for others.

3.       A little determination and elbow grease will set things right in less time than you think.

Metaphorically speaking, my office talks to me of my beliefs. It was complete chaos and the temptation to submit to despair and put off setting things right was great, but when we began working on the problem instead of working around it, in a surprisingly short time we will return to normal. There will be the lingering scars, but they, too, will fade with time and effort.

On a spiritual basis, we are all much like the detritus of the earthquake. Our lives can be in complete tumult, but when we surrender ourselves to the healing power of our Savior, Jesus Christ, we can be healed in a surprisingly short time.

This is my Christmas message this year. We celebrate his birth, but his example, life, resurrection, and saving power will save every one of us, if we choose to let him.