Monday, February 18, 2008

Earthquake

I was sitting at my computer on Friday, Feb 15 at 12.40 pm writing my usual nonsense, when the room suddenly moved. It was peculiar, as if a shrug passed through the walls, and everything swayed. I knew immediately it was neither a bomb nor a plane breaking the sound barrier, common occurrences here, because the windows did not rattle. This was a quiet displacement, an earthquake!
I immediately ran into the living room, stood in the doorway, and called to Naomi who (you guessed it) was on the phone, and I told her that there was an earthquake. Since she was concentrating on talking to her friend she missed it, and she expressed scepticism. However, we soon noticed that the light fixture was shaking from side to side, a painting on the wall was vibrating, and the water in the water jug was oscillating (there were no dinosaurs around either).
We looked for confirmation on the English news but it was not mentioned. Only on Sunday in the Jerusalem Post there was a report that an earthquake measuring 5.6 on the Richter-scale was felt in Israel on Friday, with its center in south Lebanon. As far as I know noone was hurt and there was no damage from this earthquake. But then friends told us that there had been another quake measuring 4.3 last week, when we were away in England. This is worrying, since it is usual to have preceding tremors of increasing intensity before a really big one.
We share more in common with California than the weather. We are in an earthquake zone, and the deepest and longest trench on earth, the Syrian-African rift, runs from northern Israel (the Hula Valley and the sea of Galillee) through central Israel (the Dead Sea and the lowest point on earth) through the Red Sea to Ethiopia. This is unstable and there are earthquakes from time to time, there was a big one in the mid-1800s, and a small one about 14 years ago that wrecked a hotel in Eilat. But a "big one" is overdue here, just as in California. Since one of the reasons my wife decided she did not want to live in California was the earthquakes, she may have made a slight error. Unfortunately, Israeli buildings are often built on "stilts" and are not earthquake proof and it is predicted that most of them would collapse in a major earthquake, causing many casualties. But, its too late now. Just another reason why living in Israel is so exciting and unpredictable.

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