My Earthquake Fail

If you want to know what not to do if an earthquake happens in the middle of the night, follow my example.

Here's what happened. It was late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. I was fast asleep, having some psycho nightmare. My sleep abruptly ended. I thought I was still in the nightmare, so my first thought was that there was a murderer in my bedroom. I sat up, looked around. No murderer. Then it hit me: - my bed is shaking like crazy, my dresser is pounding against the wall - this is an earthquake. Sitting there in my bed, in a weird nightmare/half sleep/who-knows-where mindset, it didn't even cross my mind to do something. There were no thoughts of taking cover under something sturdy or making a dash for the front door. I just sat there in my bed, heart pounding, trying to imagine how much it would hurt when the ceiling fell on me. I would be lying if I said I wasn't quite terrified.

I am not sure why I freaked out, except that it was in the middle of the night, and I had had a horrifying dream. When there have been tremors during the day (although I admit I have never felt one that strong), I always assume it is no big deal. During my moment of frozen fear in the middle of the night, my roommate had already jumped out of bed, crouched in a door frame, and later walked into the hallway, ready to go outside. Next door, my neighbor was contemplating whether to hide under her whole bed or just under the mattress. Some neighbors down the way snatched their kids out of bed and ran outside. Some people managed to sleep though the whole thing, which means they must be very heavy sleepers. That was no small amount of shaking going on.

After the tremor stopped, I saw my neighbor turn her light on next door, which inspired me to turn my light on in some sort of "I'm alive! Did you feel that earthquake?" Morse Code-like signal. That made me feel a little better. The aftershock came next, but the tremor wasn't as bad as the first. My body didn't want to sleep after that, but after some struggle, I fell into a couple of earthquake inspired dreams. I was relieved when my alarm went off and the world seemed normal again.

The earthquake was a 6.4 on Richter scale, taking place a little off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, about 99 miles northwest from Managua. Looking back, I see that my reaction was ridiculous. Why didn't I do anything? Why didn't I get out of my bed?! Thankfully, the tremor we felt here wasn't any bigger and did no damage. I will let that be my practice run; next time that happens in the middle of the night, I will NOT just sit there.

The good news is that I can reenact this story to my students tomorrow, and they will LOVE it.