Only one of those 104 quakes really matters to me, however, the 5.4 temblor that struck near the Chino Hills--about 35 miles from here-- at about 11:30 this morning. It was a roller, lasting about 20 seconds or so and, because we haven't had a good one like that in a while, it got everyone's heart pounding. Though most of us are used to them by now, we have been in what feels like a prolonged period of seismic quietude and when we get a little wake up call like this one, the adrenaline starts pumping and we overload the phone system needing to ask everyone we know, "Did you feel it!?" We are a considerate city, if not the brightest in the world.
Of course, the rocker could not have struck at a worse time for Casita Moreno. With most of the interior walls gone, the floors stripped of any sheeting that might provide shear strength, and the 10 ton tile roof held up by little more than a few temporary 2x4s, she swayed and shimmied like a coked-up go-go dancer. The framing crew scampered out of there as fast as their legs could carry them, pie-wide eyes praying for the extra minute it would take them to burst through Montezuma's window to the relative safety of the front yard.
Luckily, the old lady stood her ground. And a good thing she did. I did not, as of 11:30 this morning, have any insurance at all for earthquakes. Eep!
Not for want of trying, mind you. When I went through the whole Allstate-dumped-us-buy-new-insurance thing, I asked about earthquake coverage. Somehow, it fell through the cracks (maybe I couldn't bring myself to write the check, again 2x what we were paying before). About 10 days ago, however, clear from any incipient paperwork demands, I restarted the process, which was set to go save for a single document the company required before issuing the policy. The company needed my contractor to sign off on the fact that the house was retrofitted.
For those of you unfamiliar with California earthquake building codes, the wooden frames of most houses built before the 1994 Northridge Quake basically sat on their concrete foundations like a hen on her nest. When Northridge hit , houses danced and jumped off their foundations like bacon in an iron skillet (we nickname our big quakes by epicenter, thus everyone knows what you are saying when you say "Northridge," "Loma Prieta," "Sylmar," or "Long Beach"). Thus was born the earthquake retrofitting industry, started by a nice orthodox jewish guy named Shelly Purluss.
Shelly appeared at my door one day in 2001, kepah on his balding head, and patiently explained to me that retrofitting involves drilling through the sill plate of the house and sinking compression or epoxy bolts in the foundation, the bolting the house down to keep it from doing the jitterbug every time Mother Nature shakes her thang. Where cripple walls support the first floor above the foundation, plywood sheeting gets nailed to all the walls, stiffening their shear value and greatly reducing the tendency of these weakly constructed framed walls from collapsing. These were the two largest causes of damage in the Northridge quake, and Shelly, having pioneered the process before it hit, had pictures of two identical old houses near the epicenter, one of which was totally destroyed and the other, which he had just retrofit, virtually unscathed. The LA Times ran the picture shortly thereafter, and an industry was born. There are now hundreds of companies running around bolting houses.
Shelly was kind enough to come out and bolt our home when Charlie was born, part of my "new Dad sleep better" initiative, reducing the fear that my house too would choose to tango-slide down the hill and, I suppose, fulfilling that primal father instinct to protect the young cubs. That, combined with the red yarn my mother suggest I tie under Charlie's crib mattress to keep the evil spirits from rising up from below and stealing his life in the middle of the night, seemed to appease the anxiety, at least until we discovered the cracked ridge beam and I almost simultaneously realized that being a parent meant slaying the dragons of free-floating anxiety every night for the rest of your life. But that's another story.
Writers are often given gifts by life, and in case you haven't gotten ahead of me here already, I could never, from the workings of my meager brain, create the delicious irony that I don't have earthquake insurance because the company writing the construction insurance policy on my denuded, matchstick-supported house needs to be assured that this fragile house of cards with the 10-ton roof, currently held together by little more than some old nails and luck, is properly attached to the foundation.
The comedian Shelly Berman (no relation to the Quake guy) had a classic routine in the 50's describing the experience of flying on airliners assured that he was wearing his seat belt, because if he wasn't strapped to his seat, he might very well fall out of his seat, say, if the plane came to a sudden stop, say, against a mountain, in which case only the top half of his body would fly out of the seat, the bottom remaining sitting there, legs crossed, a macabre picture. I love the word macabre and this is where I learned it. Certainly, the mental picture of my collapsed house, a pile of splintered sticks and shattered red tile whose sill plate in nonetheless firmly attached to its foundation would be, in some small way, similarly macabre, if not nearly as funny.
Just to prove that some lessons are hard to learn, it actually crossed my mind to have a conversation with my new insurance company in an attempt to explain the insanity of their request, but Alice's rabbit hole immediately opened its maw and, having spent quite enough time down there of late shaking my earthen head, I chose to banish the thought and get Stephen to sign the damn paper.
On the bright side, I ordered a cup holder for my scooter, which arrived today, an invention that makes eminent sense.
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