Tonight we had a magnitude 5.6 earthquake in east San Jose. It was felt throughout the valley, although not by me, since I was running around on a frisbee field at the time.
Debbi says it spooked the cats quite a bit, and herself a little too. Subrata‘s wife Susan says a few things fell off at their house.
Fortunately there seems to have been only minor damage from the strongest Bay Area quake since 1989. Cell phone voice service was out for us for a while, but data still worked, so I sent Debbi and Susan text messages that we were fine. I bet some hidden damage will be found over the next few days, but it looks like we got away with one this time.
Anyway, if you were wondering, we’re okay here.
Hidden Damage – reminds me of the time we were living down in LA and had an earthquake about this size. It didn’t cause any obvious damage around us other than a few cracks in the masonry of our two story apartment building. But a day or so later I noticed a strange behavior in our cat. He always sought out the warmest places in our apartment to nap. Suddenly, he started napping right in the middle of our hallway, a place he had never used before. I was worried about the cat, thinking he was ill. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I noticed a wet patch in the carpet at that spot. It turned out the quake had cracked a hot water pipe that ran through the cement slab our apartment was built on. The cat had immediately detected the new warm place and took advantage of it for napping.