A Year Ago Today

November 11, 2018 = EARTHQUAKE

Thank God it was our day off. By a shear stroke of luck, both Bryan and I were home that day. If we’d been in Anchorage at work, it would have been a whole different story.

It was 8:30 in the morning and I had just gotten started at organizing our CDs, which meant that I had a pile of CDs on the floor around me that I was alphabetizing one at a time and placing them into the cabinet where they go. I don’t remember what Bryan and Mother were doing.  We had only recently moved in to the house and still had a lot of unpacking and organizing left to do.

Suddenly, I started hearing the weirdest sound. It was LOUD and it sounded like huge heavy equipment was running through our house. I looked down the hall into our living room and asked “What’s that sound?” That’s when I realized that Bryan was shouting at me: “GET OVER HERE. NOW!” The sound had been so loud I couldn’t’ hear him. That’s also when I realized that this was an earthquake; a really big one. (Officially a 7.1)

I ran to him and we all huddled under the main beam of the house as far away from all the windows as we could get. I had my arms around Mother, and Bryan had his arms around the both of us. Both Mother and I were crying/whimpering while Bryan was shouting obscenities (yeah, that’s what he does when he’s frightened). The whole house shook so bad we could barely stand up. There was glass breaking, pictures falling, pottery shattering, and all the while that NOISE was so loud we could barely hear each other.

It only lasted a few minutes, but it felt like hours. By the time it was over, everybody was shaking. I had to sit on the floor; my legs just wouldn’t hold me. Mother wanted to start picking things up right away (that’s her way of dealing with fright) but we made her sit still for a while until we knew for sure it was over.

Within perhaps 5 minutes the second one hit; thankfully not quite as bad. I don’t remember exactly how many aftershocks hit right away, but eventually we felt safe enough to take stock of the damage. That’s when I saw that all the bottles in our “bar” had crashed to the floor, but thankfully only two actually broke. Mother’s Mexican Pottery fell off the hearth, one of them shattering to a thousand pieces. Pictures were knocked off and frames got broken. All my books walked to the edge of the shelving, but thankfully did not fall. My favorite tea mug got broken but I was eventually able to glue it back together and still use it, albeit gingerly. Mostly it was just little things like that. Nothing structural other than nails popped out of the gypsum board. We were really lucky.

I’m ashamed to say, it actually took me a while to realize that all three cats were nowhere to be found. Another search through the house located Bailey and Naldo – but we could not find Viktor. We searched again more thoroughly but still could not find him. It took a good 4 hours to finally find him hiding in Mother’s shower, and the poor guy was just petrified. He was so scared his eyes were the size of quarters and he was trembling. I put him in our bedroom with the lights turned off, thinking that would be the most comforting place for him. He promptly crawled under the blankets on our bed and didn’t come out again for 24 hours - and then only because he had to pee.  Naldo was pretty scared, too, but she didn’t react quite so bad. She just wanted to be held all weekend long – which is highly unusual for her. She normally doesn’t want to be touched, let alone held.

We began the process of putting things back in place and cleaning up the wreckage, making sure to thoroughly investigate every part of the house both inside and out. Our TV was on all day so we could keep an eye on the news and see how bad it was. There are at least 5 overpasses between Palmer and Anchorage and all of them were compromised, so traffic was pretty much ground to a halt for the foreseeable future. Again, I’m so glad we were home that day: we weren’t able to get to work again until Tuesday, 5 days later!

A quick text to all of my siblings found them all shaken (pun intended) but no bodily harm. Julie was perhaps the worst emotionally (understandably so) but Heather and Reed got the worst damage to their home. We all pulled together and helped out as needed – like family should.