Here are stories of losses — loss of friends, loss of home, loss of security. They are stories of individuals who went through earthquakes. Some of them had never encountered earthquakes before, some of them were used to the experience, but all of them were shocked by power of earth and reflected on their experiences after the quake.
Why are you laughing
Senior Muchen Wang’s first encounter with death happened when she was 12 years old.
She was living in China when the earthquake happened — the 8.0-magnitude earthquake that shook the Sichuan province in southern China and destroyed houses, offices, schools and lives in those terribly short yet deadly minutes. Wang acutely felt the pain of loss — her friend, 12 years old at that time, died under the fallen bricks in the earthquake.
Wang recalls trying to find her friend online, trying to understand why she had gone for so long, why she suddenly disappeared out of her life.
It was almost a year later when Wang heard about what had happened in those seconds. The earthquake happened early in the afternoon, when her friend was sleeping in a hotel alone.
“Nobody woke her up. Three days later, they found her body,” Wang said.
It happened through a series of unfortunate coincidences. Her friend skipped a grade less than a year before the earthquake and was able to go off on an early summer vacation. She happened to fly to Sichuan to see her favorite animal, pandas, and happened to stay there on May 12. And the earthquake hit when she was sleeping, alone.
Wang did not talk to her friend’s parents until long after she graduated elementary school. She learned that the parents were trying to teach elementary school children earthquake safety in all parts of the country. Through them, Wang learned how to properly protect herself in case of an earthquake, when she realized that she, as well as her friend, was not as prepared for earthquakes as she thought.
She recalls the earthquake drills in her elementary school in China. All students were supposed to evacuate the buildings, and the school conducted yearly speeches raising awareness of natural disasters. Wang and her classmates had always wanted to laugh and chat during the drills — they were only kids. Yet they had always been scared to silence by their stern teacher who forbid any talking during earthquake drills or during the biannual speeches about awareness of natural disasters.
“I used to be really scared of that teacher,” Wang said, “but now that I think about it, I think she is a responsible teacher. She was trying to save our lives.”
When she heard about the Sichuan earthquake, she was shocked by what she saw on television: piles of bricks, rows of homeless people, half-buried backpacks. It was the first time that she felt the power of nature and the vulnerability of human lives in the face of natural disasters. She donated all of her pocket money; it was all she could do.
From that point on, Wang stocked up bottles of water under her bed. And whenever she went to an unfamiliar place, she would always first find the emergency exit, so that she would not be trapped inside.
When Wang moved to Cupertino in 2011, she was surprised by the earthquake drills at school. She was told by her deceased friend’s parents, who started voluntarily doing safety education in elementary schools, to always, always get out of a building during an earthquake. And yet, what made her uncomfortable was the lack of seriousness during the school’s earthquake drill.
“I was in the library when we did the drill,” Wang said. “And people were laughing and talking. I thought, ‘Why are you doing that?’”
According to Wang, students need to be more aware of the seriousness of the earthquake.
“There should be speeches made by people who have been through earthquakes, so that people get [a sense] of how serious it is,” Wang said. “When it comes to natural disaster, it can be life or death.”
Remembering Loma Prieta
Spanish teacher Richelle Griffin still remembers that late afternoon 25 years ago when she was watching television in her parents’ house in Los Gatos, and the couch in the living room slid across the floor carrying Griffin’s mother with it. Her mother screamed, cupboards opened and vases, bottles and everything else in the room broke as the once-stable earth began to roll.
It was Oct. 17, 1989 — the day Loma Prieta shook the area around Santa Cruz and claimed nearly 60 lives.
When Griffin first felt the earthquake, she ran to the doorframe of her parents’ house and braced herself for the shaking, which did not seem unusual until she realized that it was not one of the numerous, smaller quakes she had experienced growing up.
“When I was younger, it seemed like we had earthquakes all the time,” Griffin said. “It would be small, and it was kind of exciting, because it would be a little shake, then it would be over … But [this] earthquake lasted a really long time; it kept going and getting bigger. When the shaking finally stopped, [my mother and I walked] around to see what was broken, but there were so many aftershocks that we had to keep running back to the doorframe.”
Griffin and her mother were right at the base of a foothill, an area where the police used a bullhorn to announce an evacuation due to broken gas lines. The two packed up some possessions and turned off their water heater, resulting in the lack of hot water for at least two weeks. Griffin says that she and her mother had to ask friends for permission to shower at their houses. However, even attempting to contact others had become a difficult task; not everyone had cell phones.
Afterwards, Griffin discovered from her friends who were in San Francisco at the time of the shaking that the Oakland Bridge had collapsed during the earthquake.
“‘The freeway was rolling like water,’” Griffin said, quoting the words of her friends.
Griffin recalls participating in earthquake drills during elementary school, but she believes that what really prepared her for a considerable earthquake were the smaller earthquakes that occurred throughout her childhood. She remembers being calm at the start of the Loma Prieta earthquake because she had gone through so many little earthquakes and knew what to do.
As a result, Griffin believes that the “Duck-and-Cover” drill that students regularly practice within grade schools today would not be entirely useful in the face of a major earthquake. In the drill, students are told to put their hands on top of their heads for protection. According to Griffin, in the event of a substantial earthquake, the students’ heads will not be protected sufficiently by their hands.
In terms of awareness, Griffin believes that residents of California generally are aware of the occurrences and consequences of earthquakes. However, she feels that certain aspects of preparation are still inadequate.
When it comes to earthquake safety supplies, Griffin felt that she and her mother were not prepared for the Loma Prieta earthquake. Of all the indispensable earthquake supplies — bottled water, battery-operated radios and a food supply — Griffin and her mother only had water, and simply because they used to order water to drink.
Griffin recollects that when she worked at a preschool a few years later, another earthquake struck. This time, she says, they were ready.
“We had water, a food supply, flashlights and first-aid,” Griffin said. “That’s the part I don’t think people are prepared for.”
Home alone
“I could hear glasses and windows breaking everywhere at home,” Senior Erika Sudo said. “I was scared.”
On March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan when Sudo was only in eighth grade, but it was not the first earthquake she had encountered. Having lived in Tokyo all her life, Sudo was used to smaller earthquakes every now and then. However, it was the first time she had to go through an earthquake that big, alone.
Sudo immediately called out to her puppy and they hid together under the dining table. She hugged her puppy hard and waited until the shaking stopped.
“My dog was quiet,” Sudo said. “Maybe he was scared, too.”
During that one minute of glass breaking, she thought about her parents at work and her brother who was in school at that time, and wondered if they were okay. But what also went through her mind were the boxes of instant rice stocked up in the cupboards, the rice that they used to ready themselves for an unexpected earthquake.
After what felt like an hour, Sudo climbed out from under the dining table. Piles of broken glasses lay in front of the cupboard and under the holes that used to be windows. She immediately took out her phone and called her parents and her brother. Later she learned that her brother was stalled at the train station.
Then she continued what she had been doing before the earthquake began — she opened up her textbooks, now covered in a thin layer of dust, and continued studying.
“I had to study for my finals,” Sudo explained, shrugging her shoulders.
During the next three hours before her parents came back home, Sudo stayed at the dining table so that if an aftershock came she could hide under the table again, and she checked in with her friends through emails — to see if they were okay, and also to discuss a pressing issue, whether they still had to study for their finals.
However, as the conversation continued, Sudo slowly realized the severity of the earthquake. Her friends’ houses all suffered from turned-over bookcases and broken glasses, but one of the houses had to be rebuilt — it was tilted by the power of the earthquake.
“I realized that Tokyo was not safe,” she said. “And I noticed danger was nearer than I thought.”
On the Talgar fault
“It felt like the entire house shifted,” PE teacher Dasha Plaza said. “It was almost like it had wheels and was rolled from one side to another.”
Plaza was only a young girl when she experienced a 6.5-magnitude earthquake in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 1991. China, crystals and glassware slid off shelves and crashed onto the floor, houses collapsed, fractures and cracks appeared in walls and the city camped outdoors for days.
The nighttime earthquake struck approximately at 10 p.m., when Plaza was at home watching TV with her mother and brother. Right when the first shift occurred, everything fell off the top shelf in the living room. Books fell out of bookshelves, and they could hear dishes and china rattling fiercely in the kitchen. Plaza and her family ran under a doorway for a couple of minutes, but soon after, her mother went to pack important documents, passports and food. Then they ran outside.
“There was an additional aftershock and you could see the whole house moving from side to side,” Plaza said. “All the neighborhood was running out and gathering [outside].”
Plaza remembers the media and radio alerting the public that aftershocks would be at least of a 4.0 or 5.0-magnitude, which was the predominant reason the city camped outside for two days. Because Plaza and her family had a large backyard, Plaza’s family stayed in their own backyard on sheets for the two nights. However, not all Almaty residents were as lucky; one of Plaza’s friends lived on the top floor of a 12-story building, and, worried about potential aftershocks, she had to set up tents in a park.
“You could tell that people were panicking,” Plaza said. “The whole city was in such a situation. The stores would have limited food because people were buying everything off the shelves.”
Radio and television announcements also alerted the public when it was safe to move back into the buildings. Plaza says that her house had cracks all along the outside base of the house. There were several fractures in the walls of older, more weathered buildings. Some of the older houses, built in the early 1900s, even collapsed.
As a city situated right atop the Talgar fault, Almaty is a seismically-active area, with little “shocks,” as Plaza terms the smaller earthquakes, occurring quite a few times per year. Large-scale earthquakes with extensive impacts have also happened before in Almaty’s history, nearly demolishing the entire city.
Plaza recalls that although she went through earthquake drills in school about once a year, what really reinforced preparation for her was the wary attitude of her parents on earthquakes.
“My parents were really cautious about it and they kept reminding [my brother and I] what to do,” Plaza said. “They did go through a lot of [earthquakes], so I remember my mom always said, ‘ … If an earthquake happens, you have to run under a doorway.’”
As a result, Plaza does not believe that doing earthquake drills once a year will help prepare students well enough for a larger earthquake. She says that it is necessary to continue those earthquake drills throughout the year, rather than only once at the beginning of the year, to reinforce the students’ mindset regarding earthquakes. Plaza believes it is important for students, especially those who live in seismically active areas, to understand that earthquakes are not mere myths and the damage an earthquake can inflict is colossal.
“Doing one drill will never prepare you mentally for something like that — something big and dramatic and devastating,” Plaza said. “I don’t think [students] really understand how damaging this experience can be, because they are only taught in a movie or newspaper or on the news. But I think we just always have that thought in the back of our minds because we do live in this area where we are prone to earthquakes, so we always have to know where our safest places around us are.”
What Plaza also finds faulty is the amount of protection students are offered by the chairs and attached desks. When she was a student, her school had sturdy, individual desks that were separate from chairs, in comparison to the seats at MVHS.
“The chairs here, they are pretty tight, and the desk part of it is pretty narrow,” Plaza said. “Realistically, if you think about it, if I am a six-foot-two human being trying to climb under and protect myself with the chair, [I] do not know how much protection I will get.”
The benches in the PE locker rooms do not seem appealing to Plaza either, as places of safety; she says that in the event of an earthquake, she would rather run out of the building than attempt to crawl under a low, narrow bench with twenty other kids.
The mentality with which students and society in general face earthquakes is extremely salient, in Plaza’s opinion. She says that her friend, who was teaching in a tall building in Tokyo, Japan when a 5.0-magnitude earthquake struck the area, informed her that all of the students were calm and prepared — the class quietly evacuated without rushing or stumbling over people. She attributes this to the way the entire society of an extremely seismically active country is mentally prepared for earthquakes.
Ultimately, Plaza thinks that practicing not panicking and staying calm is the most important aspect of preparing for earthquakes. If the training is planted in at a young age, students may be more ready for an extensive earthquake — if and when it strikes.
What still frightens Plaza is the damage an earthquake can deliver in mere seconds and the lack of control human beings have in earthquakes. She recollects that twenty years ago, in Almaty, very few families had organized a survival kit because few were willing to think about earthquakes; many people were in denial. She hopes that no one would have to experience an earthquake like she did.
“It’s something scary and you cannot control nature, and you cannot control the power of nature,” Plaza said. “It’s not like somebody’s shaking [his] foot and you tell [him], ‘Stop shaking your foot.’ You cannot tell the earth to stop shaking. I just hope that it’s not going to happen too often, and that [we will] be ready. Just know your stuff, be aware and educate yourself about the areas you live in.”
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