Earthquake Etiquette

Chris Ayres notices problems with people's reactions to an earthquake.

.....when tectonic plates collide, the official advice from the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is to cower under your desk......there have been approximately 140,000 earthquakes in Southern California since the last one that did any significant damage (this being the Northridge rumble of '94, which killed 72). If you had cowered under your desk during every single one of them, you would almost certainly have been sent away by now to live in a rubber-walled cell with a man who wears his underpants on his head and thinks he's a toaster.

However,this is probably not the ideal response.....

Take my friend Tom (not his real name). On the morning of July 29 he was sitting at a large conference table in the financial district, surrounded by important people with important-sounding acronyms instead of job titles. When, all of a sudden, the very fabric of the Universe seemed to be coming apart at the seams, he panicked. Spectacularly.

Tom is still unable to give a full and accurate account of his behaviour, but from what I can gather, he sprang out of his chair, flapped his arms around a great deal, shouted a variety of sexual obscenities, then proceeded to grab the woman sitting next to him and pull her violently under the nearest door frame (Fema says that this is the next best thing to a desk). The jeers from his colleagues almost drowned out what was left of the tectonic rumbling, and his boss (who later accused him of sexism) didn't speak to him for days.