Have you ever had one of those events in your life that everyone talks about? You know, the thing that provides everyone with an interesting or freaky story about where they were or what they were doing when it happened?
We knew that Eureka was earthquake country when we decided to move there. Garth would always joke about it being one of the worst places in the world for a ceramic artist and collector to move. There have been some big earthquakes in Eureka, but things have been relatively quiet since a 7.1 earthquake struck in 1994.
The truth is, Garth and I were out of town when the big quake hit. We were in Portland, trying to relax with friends before the beginning of the upcoming semester.
While our new town was being shaken up, we were wandering back to our hotel for a mid-afternoon nap. We flipped on NPR just five minutes after the big event and were surprised to hear the first reports of a quake hitting off the coast of Ferndale, a town about twenty miles south of Eureka.
My first thought was, “Oh my God, I hope our friends in Ferndale are okay.”
If this sounds strange it is because I am a Midwestern girl and the common natural disaster in that neck of the woods is the tornado. Tornadoes are pretty direct, they run through one town and don’t do a thing to homes 20 miles away.
Tornadoes will politely pick off one house on a block or remove every roof but one. While I grew up with these crazy storms, I had never seen actual earthquake damage. My first feeling was a touch of relief that it did not start rattling under Eureka. This was naive, and I am not actually that stupid. We were far away and it was hard to imagine the ground rolling beneath the town we now call home.
Soon we discovered that the epicenter of the earthquake was 25 miles from Eureka, and all the resulting waves of force were directed at Old Town Eureka, a path that led straight past our new house. We were worried.
Part of what we love about living in Eureka is how many awesome friends we have. Within fifteen minutes of the quake our friend was crawling outside of our house with her cell phone trying to peer in all of our windows. She couldn’t see much, but reported that our fish tank was still upright and the fish were zipping around inside. We were comforted by this, but immediately began to theorize about what we would find destroyed upon our return.
The following morning, two more friends checked on things to be sure that we didn’t have a gas leak. They reported that lots of water was running from beneath the house. They turned our water main off for us, and we drove home early.
Part of what has been so exhausting about this experience is that Garth and I were not home. You can wear yourself out trying to anticipate the worst. We had no clue what we would find when we arrived at home so we took a deep breath, held hands, and walked right in.
I don’t know if the damage is better or worse than I expected. I would say that most of the house looked as bad as the aftermath of a crazy high school party from an 80’s movie. There was no pizza on the turntable, but records and books were tossed from shelves, the television took a nosedive from its cabinet, a toy from inside of the fish tank was half way across the room and fish water mysteriously splashed all the way around a wall. Pictures were askew, the surround sound speakers tore free from their perches, half of our glassware was shattered on the floor, the pantry was opened and two jars of chili garlic sauce were exploded on the floor. The Ikea record shelf was now a parallelogram instead of a square, paint split off some walls, everything came out of our bathroom cabinets, and our good kitchen knife embedded itself into the molding on the floor in the kitchen Sword in the Stone style. These things are all messy and upsetting, but we had other damage that feels much more tragic at the moment. In our living room and parlor the plaster walls have dramatic cracks running from wall to wall (that’s NEWLY PAINTED wall to NEWLY PAINTED wall, mind you). Several pieces of our vintage china set leapt to their death, but the loss that pains me the most is that our Jeffrey Kaller ceramic sculpture was smashed to bits.
We wandered around marveling at what took a hit and what stayed still on shelves. One top shelf of our china cabinet was empty, but rows of teacups below were untouched. Some objects had long falls and lived while others were practically dust.
Honestly, things will be fine. Our stuff is just stuff, no matter how much we enjoy surrounding ourselves with it. I am relieved to own such a resilient house that has bucked and turned with every quake since 1905 and still stands strong. We already repaired our plumbing issue and now all of our readers can learn how to repair cracked plaster walls along with us.
As we brace ourselves for aftershocks (museum wax anyone?), I will leave you with this comment left on my Facebook page by one of my favorite people:
We’re so sorry for your ceramic losses! And the damage to your new plaster and paint. Glad that you and the fish are unharmed.
Is your new waterheater strapped down? Will there be a future post on “Earthquake-proofing with the Johnsons”?
Those non-slip pads work as good shelf liners. Baby proofing your cabinets might be the way to go, too. For the cracks in the wall, I tend to use an elastomeric patching compound. Be sure it is how you want it because unlike other patching compounds, you can’t sasnd it well afterwards.
Oh kids… I am soooo sorry; but yes, it is just stuff. You and Garth and your friends are fine.
Sorry to hear of the losses! It is interesting to see what shatters & what doesn’t; seemingly randomly. We also had weird breakage, shifting, and perfectly fine things.
So sorry to hear about the damage. Ugh. Looks like Eureka had a welcome party for you while you were out of town. If I were a realtor in this town I would gift every new home owner with a basket full of museum putty at closing.
So sorry about the damage and your sculpture. It was so impressive and I would be more upset about that than anything else too. I hope something as special comes into your life to replace the loss.
I was home here in Brookings, Or when the quake hit. I had found your blog via Etsy’s front page earlier in the week, so I immediately thought about your home and how much damage it may have escaped. I listen to KHSU every day, and they were reporting that a lot of the Victorian homes were damaged. I fell in love with the sculpture, and am so sorry that it is no longer.
I’ve been searching for this precise information on this subject for a long time. Bookmarked and recommended!
[...] We paid dearly for our procrastination. In January, Eureka got hit with an earthquake that measured 6.5 on the Richter scale a few days before the Haiti earthquake hit. The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile made us feel much more fortunate about our broken stuff, but we’re still kicking ourselves. You can read our full account of the earthquake damage HERE. [...]