The Noise of an Earthquake
It was 2014, January. Off the coast the Pacific Plate slid along the Australian Plate and our house began to shake. We were about 20 miles from the epicenter of one in a long series of New Zealand earthquakes.
There’s nothing like standing on terra firma and have it go unfirm on you.
Update 5 Sep 2021: Another earthquake, shaking felt in Feilding NZ, M-5.0
We’d had a minor earthquake some weeks before, but now we had a long-lasting one, maybe a minute long.
A minute is a long time when you don’t know whether to stay in the house, or leave, or scream, whether to go out the front, or if you have a back door, out the back. Especially when the house is screeching with a never-before-heard sound.
I had just left the kitchen, on my way to the front of the house along an internal hallway. The movement started, a jarring shake from one side to the other. This was different from the recent quake, which had caused a brief, silent, gentle rolling.
I stood, trying to decide, trying to reach both walls of the hallway at the same time for stability. Thinking about the roof, thinking about the front-yard trees and electrical wires coming in from the street and what could come down and break us or trap us.
That screeching had to be the metal roof.
The metal roof doing what? Pulling against the nails? Pulling up against the nails, or side-to-side? Pulling itself off, maybe beginning to fly away?
Whatever was happening up there, its sound penetrated the ceiling and rang throughout the inside space of the house.
And then it stopped. I was still inside, John was too. We hadn’t decided what to do, we had simply not done anything and there we were, still alive.
That’s when we ran outside.
Nothing had fallen off the house. The roof was still there. The street and cars parked at the curb were still there.
I began to wonder if I had made it all up. Maybe this hadn’t been a potentially dangerous earthquake and my actions — my inactions — were sufficient. Maybe next time I should do something more to stay safe. I had done nothing, and I was fine. Was I lucky, or was it the right thing to do, to stand there bracing myself against the inside wall? Or should I have run for my life, just in case?
The Christchurch earthquake had shaken up New Zealand’s South Island not quite 3 years before, causing loss of life and a lot of damage. Its magnitude was 6.2, plenty big. And it had created 10 foot tidal waves.
Even we strangers to New Zealand were aware of how bad New Zealand earthquakes can be, and had been. But as I looked around the afternoon of our quake, I could see no damage at all. I wondered what the magnitude was. (Later we found out it was also a 6.2.)
Even our roof was intact.
It was a lovely day, and I hadn’t yet taken my walk. Unscathed as we were, we couldn’t tell much about damage elsewhere. I headed north on Kimbollton Road, the relatively major north-south road in the town of Feilding where we lived. Traffic was perhaps a bit light. Everything looked normal.
Just 3 to 4 houses up the street, a man I hadn’t previously met was out in his yard. I stopped to ask him if all was well — it all looked fine — and he said yes.
Yes, BUT….
What he said next made me realize that I had had reason to be concerned with the shaking we got. He said that he’d had plenty of experience with earthquakes, and if this one had continued much longer, or had been just a little stronger, we would have seen major damage. Right here in our small town, where everything seemed normal.
We talked about Christchurch and other earthquakes. He was knowledgeable. It was the way things were in New Zealand, and he’d been keeping track all his life.
He turned back to his yard work. I had wanted to ask about the noise from the roof but I’d spent enough of his time.
So what did he do when today’s shaking started? Did his roof screech? Did anything fall off shelves? I never did find him outside again to continue the conversation.
We had to go back to the US three months later. We haven’t been back to New Zealand. It’s been more than 7 years now. Who knew we’d never get back? To know that would have made me sad. But then who knew that traveling itself was no longer done as it had been in 2013? That 14-hour plane rides were not only not appealing, but potentially full of contagion? That the LAX International terminal was jam-packed, crowded? And that New Zealand wouldn’t even have let us in, for a while there?
While I was bracing myself in my hallway, listening to that hideous screeching, did I say to myself, “A new forever memory!” or “What an interesting experience!”? No. But that’s what it was, unique and unforgettable. Strong, noisy, interesting, part of being in New Zealand.
What about your memories? Did you know them as you were having them? Will you get to repeat them? What do you think of them now? Want to tell us?
Peg Lewis is a great-grandmother, a linguist, and a life-long writer and scientist. She was born in New England. She also lived in San Diego, Spain, Switzerland, Beijing, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Tucson in a 3-generation household where she is next-to-oldest.
Peg believes in Old Love, a rich genre not to be confused with young romance. Old Love is about relationships, deep, enduring, and complicated. She knows: she has been married to space scientist and author John S Lewis for 57 years, and if she is old, he is yet older.
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