Thursday, June 23, 2011

A Little Excitement

Somehow Rich and I both managed to snooze through a 7.4 earthquake that happened about 80 miles away. He in his recliner and I on the couch...both of us had been reading and dropped off to sleep. I woke up and got on Facebook only to see lots of chatter about an earthquake.
I looked online and sure enough, it had happened about 15 minutes earlier. Can't believe we didn't feel a thing. Next thing ya know, Rich called me over to the door to see our parking lot and our yard filling up with people. We'd heard sirens but did not realize we were under a tsunami warning! Since we live in UniSea housing, many of the employees had been evacuated to the hills behind our house.

Here's our parking area. We asked our upstairs neighbor if she'd felt the earthquake and she said it was pretty strong. How could we have not noticed?!
We kept an eye out but didn't feel a need to climb the hill. We are on high ground as it is and figured we'd be safe. I did put my shoes on, just in case. :) Rich and I both took photos and he also got some video which I will try to upload.

These guys were waiting it out in our front yard. Guess they were not too keen to make the big climb, either.

The water looked calm from here.

Everyone hung out for about an hour and then the warning was cancelled. Whew! Just another little Aleutian adventure!

"What is going on and why are all these people surrounding our house?!!"

I don't know if I was in denial or what, but I really was not worried. Of course, if I'd seen the water start to rise and rush toward land, I would have been hauling butt up the hill. :)

2 comments:

DGreen said...

I kept wondering who all the folks were that were dressed in white when I was watching the video on your latest post. I kept thinking, "Gosh, is that emergency volunteers or what? They certainly do stand out!" Now that I've read this blog, I realized that it was the workers from the plant what was evacuating. LOL

Silly me!

I am glad to see and hear (plug for KUCB.org) about how everyone responded so quickly to the sirens and warnings. I guess I lived around sirens and such so long that I've become ambivalent about them, which is not a good thing.

Gigi said...

Yes, the employees in white were coming straight from work. It did look a little strange seeing all those folks completely covered from head to toe.

The evacuation seemed to go very smoothly. It was my first experience with something like this and I was impressed with the way everyone handled it!

Thanks for your note!