For someone who has lived through a massive earthquake (as I did in Taiwan in 1989), the disturbing thing, even for someone who has lived in earthquake zones for years, is the aftershocks. They build up to a doubt about whether the earth can ever be counted on to lie still. Now after more than a decade of living somewhere where earthquakes are unknown, I largely am back to counting on the earth beneath my feet to lie still. (The danger here, and it is a considerable danger, is slipping and falling on ice. That paralyzed my dad for the last six years of his life.) The earthquake news from Japan brings back a lot of memories from the Ring of Fire. Many people there will be wondering over the next few weeks if the term "solid ground" has any meaning at all.
I lived in Phoenix when there was an Earthquake somewhere down south in Mexico and I felt it. The earth was moving back and forth, the blinds on my window moved back and forth and not ever having felt an Earthquake it was the weirdest feeling in the world.
I can't imagine a strong earthquake or what it would feel like, but Phoenix which is definitely not known for its earthquakes moving underneath my feet made me more wary about what I am walking on than ever before.
I'll raise you - a friend of a friend's grandad sent his family for a summer vacation and was sitting in bathroom reading a book, enjoying the quiet. The bathroom door was left open and he could see out into the apartment. With a corner of his eye he caught a chandelier in the living room that started swinging and then he felt the floor moving underneath his feet. Since this was in Moscow, the city sitting on the plateau, his first thought was that he was having a stroke. And the second - that it'd be a shame to collapse with his pants down, real shame. It did not occur to him it could be a quake, which it was. The only time in modern history a noticeable quake was felt in Moscow. So yeah... quakes can really sneak up on you ;)
Not necessarily a story about earthquakes sneaking up on you, but a funny one. I work in Shenzhen right now in China. One day in the office, 11th floor, everyone suddenly feels the floor shake for a few seconds. We're all thinking earthquake. So what do you do when there's an earthquake? Well, I remember being taught in grade school that if you're outside, you make for an open field or area where things can't fall on you. If you're inside, you crawl under a desk, table, anything that can protect you from falling stuff.
What does everyone do? Stand up, look at each other, and dash to the window to look outside. I felt kinda stupid being the only one just sitting there, so I went to look out the windows as well. Even more funny? We had an rehearsal later that afternoon for the entire building, to practice what to do in the case of an emergency disaster.
Last year, sometime around April if I remember correctly... let me check my Facebook backup. (Yay for searching a big huge HTML document)
April 4, 2010 is when it happened, sometime late in the morning, afternoon. I just remember just waking up and trying to decide if I should go take a shower or not, and thus lying in bed.
Now that my sense on quakes seems unreliable, probably due to series of aftershocks, I just have installed SeisMac (a seismometer app for Mac) to tell if it is really an aftershock.
It's disturbing even at a subconscious level. I left two windows open, creating a cross breeze, and a brief gust at 2am days after the quake caused my window blinds to rattle. I awoke from a deep, deep sleep with all the hair standing up on my body and the proverbial "colon turned to water" feeling of stark terror.
I experienced the 7.2 earthquake on Easter of 2010 in Southern California (San Diego area) and the thing I remember the most is that I felt at least one aftershock per day for at least the next 30-45 days. Nothing serious, they were always in the 4.5-5 scale region.
Have a look at this. http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/quakes/recent_quakes.htm...
Christchurch, New Zealand. Main quake, 7.1 on the scale (and with hindsight, not all that bad), was almost six months before a very shallow 6.3 aftershock which was very bad and had lots of deaths. So far there have been something like 8000 aftershocks. People from the area often seem shell-shocked.
An aftershock is, essentially, an earthquake caused either by the continuing event that caused the first quake or by the resettling of the earth in the area, and especially the latter can take a long time.
