Rockin' to Sleep

Last night the dogs were wound up, barking constantly and running from one side of the house to the other. I yelled at them to come in, but they continued with their antics. Then, the shaking began, an earthquake that lasted about 15 seconds and felt a bit stronger than the 4.0's we usually feel. TV news confirmed about 10 minutes later that it was stronger than usual, a 5.9, and centered at the east end of the Salton Sea, just across the CA/Mexico border, an area that has been experiencing ever-increasing earthquakes in both frequency and magnitude for about a year.

Today, the prognosticators will flood the airways with the gloom and doom stories headlined Are YOU Ready for the Big One? Of course, everyone who lives in Tornado Alley in the Mid-West or in the Hurricane Coastal Regions is always sort of ready for nature's vengeance, as are all of us who live in the earthquake prone Coachella Valley, but no one is really ready for any disaster because we all expect it either won't be "that bad" or it won't target our home. I worry far more about uncontained wild fires during high winds than I do about an earthquake, perhaps because I am a native Californian who has spent a lifetime living with the threat of The Big One. Sure, I have canned food and water on hand at all times, as well as basic medical supplies, but if I cannot get to them because I'm trapped under a collapsed building, what difference does it make?

Think Haiti: both the people and the emergency supplies were buried under the rubble that also blocked off the access to the victims by emergency personnel. People decried the lack of a timely response, but Haiti experienced The Big One -- and there wasn't much anyone could do about it. Mother Nature is more ferocious than man's best emergency response plan.

One of these earthquakes will rip open the Earth's crust, perhaps draining the Salton Sea in the process, and will be such a Big One that it won't matter how much worrying anyone has done in the past. Chicken Little warned the barnyard that the sky was falling, and it's still there. Earthquakes -- and hurricanes and tornadoes -- are natural events that happen, so it's better to be prepared to deal with the aftermath than it is to expend energy worrying when it will happen.