STEPHANIE SALTER: If that’s an earthquake, then this must be … Indiana?

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE April 22, 2008 10:41 pm

— Although it’s been nearly four years since I moved back to Indiana from San Francisco, there are a lot of things I still miss about California.
Earthquakes isn’t one of them.
“This must seem like no big deal to you,” many people said Friday after two quakes of 5.2 and 4.6 magnitude shook Indiana and Illinois. They said it again Monday, after another 4.6 rattled through the same Wabash Valley seismic fault system.
No, I told everyone, earthquakes are never no big deal to me. I wasn’t blasé about them in California, and I don’t imagine I’ll be blasé about them in Indiana.
In 29 years in San Francisco, I experienced dozens of earthquakes. I felt them while driving in my car, walking along the street, lying in bed, sitting at my desk, riding in a high-rise elevator (that was a real load of fun) and perching on a flimsy balcony at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Each one scared me. Each one caused that peculiar quake overload — physical and emotional — that takes a lot longer to subside than to generate.
It’s more complicated than the flight-or-fight adrenaline surge we all learned about in junior high science class. Adrenaline is involved, certainly, but something deeper and more primitive is unleashed when the one solid thing you think you can count on moves and reminds you that 100-percent stability is an illusion.
The ground, and all things on it, shake or roll or rock for usually only a few seconds, but human beings continue to vibrate — some of us longer than others.
The worst earthquake I was in was the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor. It measured 7.1 and killed 67 people, most of them in a freeway collapse in Oakland. I was in a second-floor rental office with a friend in San Francisco, looking for apartments for him before we planned to go home and watch the World Series on TV.
Acoustic ceiling tiles started falling, so we headed for the door. By the time we got to the street, the shaking had stopped. No one around us was hurt, but everyone was weak-kneed. The quake lasted 15 seconds, but it seemed like five minutes.
Until people saw smoke rising from the Marina District near San Francisco Bay and heard car radio reports about part of the Bay Bridge falling in, most of us had no idea how serious the quake was. (The final damage tally: $8.3 billion.)
In the weeks afterward, scores of aftershocks carried much more psychological punch than their Richter scale readings would indicate. Millions of people suffered from the earthquake yips.
The yips come when you’ve felt the ground move so many times, and you still have such a keen animal memory of the big original movement, you think you feel another quake coming almost every minute you’re awake.
If a truck passes or a heavy-footed person walks by on a flexible floor (like the kind in most airport piers), it has the same effect as an earthquake. Being stuck in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge and feeling it move — as a suspension bridge is supposed to — presents an exercise in individual terror control.
Before the 1989 quake, few ordinary Californians ever heard of the Loma Prieta fault. Everyone was focused on the San Andreas, Hayward or Calaveras faults. Along came Loma Prieta to deliver the largest state quake since 1906.
Kind of like the Wabash Valley fault. Here, the New Madrid fault gets all the attention. But, last week, the Wabash Valley system decided to show everyone it is alive, kicking and capable of producing its biggest quake ever.
Friday’s 5.2 woke me from a sound sleep, but I knew before my eyes opened what was going on. As I told friends — talk about disorienting!
I’d learned to relax about earthquakes in Indiana. (Good thing since tornadoes take up so much time and energy.) I could sit in traffic under old highway overpasses and never think about them falling down and crushing me. I placed pretty, breakable things on high shelves. I had no idea where my gas main shutoff valve was. I didn’t keep a pair of sturdy shoes near my bed for emergency get-aways.
One hold-over from California, though. I never felt comfortable hanging anything framed and heavy on the wall at the head of my bed. After Friday’s early-morning activity, I realized that’s still a good idea.
Until last week, Midwestern geophysicists and other seismology scientists were looked upon by many folks as a kind of punchline. Ha-ha. You study earthquakes in the Heartland? Where do you hold your conventions, in a Mini-Cooper? Ha-ha-ha.
Now, Americans know these people exist and that they say things worthy of our attention. With 24 quakes registered since last week in the epicenter vicinity (about 25 miles southwest of Vincennes), what seismologists are saying is we all should learn the words to “I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet.”
When I think about it, I guess this is fitting. The very first earthquake I ever experienced was not in California, but in Indiana, Nov. 9, 1968. (The epicenter was in southern Illinois, but the quake was felt across 23 states.)
I was lying in the top bunk of my dorm room at Purdue (even though it was about noon) when all of campus shook. I didn’t know what it was, I just knew this: I’d never felt anything like it; it scared the holy (bleep) out of me, and I had no idea I could climb out of a bunk that fast.
Some things don’t change.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.