Life in an earthquake zone

Was this ever the week! It took me a couple of hours to work my way into the garage from the large outside door and through the inside door to reach the edge of my small home office. After another half-hour of digging through the books which fell off the shelves, I was able to find my laptop computer which, thankfully, appears to be undamaged.

My wireless system to connect to the Internet is still buried under books and I don’t know, at this time, if it is still functional. After I finish this column, I’ll try to connect through my wife’s hardwire Internet system to see if I can send it in to my editor. If that doesn’t work, I’ll be visiting the Frontiersman offices tomorrow (Thursday) to see about downloading the file to their system. Let’s hope things work out!

I was planning to write about potential Christmas gift suggestions, but who can think about that considering our recent excitement? Rather, I’ll tell you about our adventures with this earthquake.

We were both home when the quake hit. The two older dogs stayed with me on the couch in the living room while our puppy, who had been with me, ran for Mommy in the bedroom. When the shaking stopped, I called to my wife to see if she was okay. She was, in spite of the framed painting hanging over our bed falling off the wall and hitting her on the head. It was more of a glancing blow, so no cuts, bruises, or lumps.

Once we both got flashlights operating after the power went out, we began to get a sense of what just happened. The house was a total disaster! As one friend characterized it, each room looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Almost nothing stayed on any shelves anywhere in the house and there’s not a picture hanging vertically on any wall.

We spent the next couple of days clearing walkways around the upstairs. First, the hallway to the bedroom, then the bathroom. We next shifted efforts to the living room area, the front entry way, and toward the deck door. We cleared the immediate area around the bed and put much effort into picking up and clearing out the bathroom. The toilet had shifted sideways, slightly, and has a small leak when flushed. We can live with the situation until we make more headway cleaning up and can bring in a plumber to fix things.

The kitchen has been, by far, the worst room so far. All the cabinets opened during the shaking, along with most of the drawers. My guess is we lost around 80 percent of all the glassware we had in the kitchen. The refrigerator door swung open and emptied its contents onto the floor. We spent about two days picking up and sweeping broken glass and spilled food. Another session involved mopping the floor. We still need to wipe out the cabinets, drawers, and the breakfast bar to get all the glass slivers cleaned up.

As we worked to clean and pick up all the broken stuff, it became apparent to me that garbage cans weren’t going to cut it for handling all the junk. We decided to rent a couple of small dumpsters and we had them spotted so we could easily throw stuff off the deck on the side of the house for the upstairs and in front of the garage for cleaning the downstairs.

So far, the only damage I have found to the house was the upstairs toilet. I haven’t gotten all the way through the house yet, so things could still be broken that I don’t know about, but, overall, we were lucky. In talking with folks at the Big Lake post office, some people have lost kitchen appliances like microwaves and dishwashers. Others have had their water heater shift enough to shear off the pipes. One friend had his pressure tank fill up with mud from the shaking in the aquafer his well was tapped into.

We had silty water in our system, but nothing like my friend’s situation. As the aftershocks have slowed and reduced their intensity, plus our use of the well, we have noticed the water clearing quickly. It’s not over yet, but things are getting better.

We’ll be cleaning up for a long time into the future and will end up with a lot less stuff than before, but that’s probably a good thing.