Well, that was effed up

[beanside]

With all due respect to my California peeps...Aaaaaaaah! *kermitflail*

Baltimore has hurricaines, tornadoes. It does not bounce. My office building (in which I am on the top floor) was not meant to minimize the effects. That's all I'm saying.

*deep breath* Anyhow. Safe & sound, just bounced a bit.

Comments

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

While a 5.8 doesn't freak me out too much if I'm in California when it happens (5.8 earns a pause and a recheck of my emergency preparedness kit), a 4.0 would scare the daylights out of me if I were in an east coast city at the time.

Heck, I don't even need to be in an earthquake in the east for the thought of one to scare me. Your cities are NOT built for that shit.

I wander around, say, downtown Boston and look at all those suspended covered walkways between buildings and all those brick buildings and my California brain screams "Run away. Run away now."

I have to remind myself that the chances of an earthquake hitting there are far lower than one hitting where I live. (and we will not speak of the buildings I regularly work in that have been known to be super seismically unsound for more than 20 years that my workplace still hasn't retrofitted. la la la la la la.)

So I'm not going to mock the people on the east coast. The media coverage, on the other hand, is entirely worthy of epic mockage.

And given that we've endured decades of getting grief for being crazy enough to live in Natural Disaster Country every time we get a baby one, if west coasters are mocking the east coast, it's resentment about how we've been treated in terms of how we get covered.

In all seriousness, the thing that disturbs me most is that cities like New York are clearly still not where they should be in terms of disaster preparedness--nearly 10 years after 9/11. We got lots of reports of people evacuating buildings, but once they got outside, they didn't know what else to do.

That's a problem.

Glad you and yours are all okay. Hopefully this'll be the last installment of Bouncing Baltimore for 100 or 200 more years.