Week 6: Stay Safe During and After an Earthquake

This week's task:   Hold an earthquake drill with your family. 

Earthquakes can shake hard.   Lisa Laycock, the wife of the mission president in Santiago, Chile during the Feb. 27th, 2010 earthquake, which lasted for three minutes, describes that earthquake below.  Santiago was about 200 miles from the quake epicenter:

"As the earthquake became more violent, the mission home groaned and wailed. The power died, so the whole city was black. The windows made a hideous screeching sound, and flying objects banged against swaying walls. The printer/fax machine, books, book ends, and fifty-pound television burst from the entertainment center and crashed to the floor, cabinets emptied, drawers flew open, the refrigerator moved, water sloshed out of the toilets, the floor jolted up and down as we ran across it trying to hold onto the walls to keep from falling down, and the piano toppled over like a small toy.... Finally, it stopped. When the calm came, we had to sit down because our legs were weak and unstable. My legs stayed wobbly all day and night yesterday. Today (Feb. 28) the muscles in my legs hurt like I ran a marathon."

UC San Diego has a very cool earthquake "shake table" that they build houses on and then shake them.  On this page you can watch videos of a bedroom and a kitchen undergoing the same pattern and intensity of shaking that occurred in the 1994 Northridge earthquake (in southern California).  Click on the video thumbnail to play it in your browser (this might also motivate you to secure your furniture if you didn't do it last week).

To prepare to keep safe during all of that shaking, let's do a family earthquake drill!

Steps (most of this information is taken from the FEMA website):

1. Review the DROP, COVER and HOLD procedure:  DROP to the ground; take COVER by getting under a sturdy table or other piece of furniture; and HOLD ON until the shaking stops. If there isn’t a table or desk near you, cover your face and head with your arms and crouch in an inside corner of the building.
2. Review FEMA's additional information about how to stay safe if the shaking starts when you are indoors, outdoors, or in a moving vehicle, or if you find yourself covered with debris when the shaking stops.  Also review what to do and what not to do immediately after the earthquake.  Click here for a pdf or here to go directly to the FEMA earthquake page - click on the 'during' and 'after' tabs to see the relevant information. 
3. Hold the drill!  Ideally, have several drills over the course of a couple days and have different family members in charge of starting the drill so that everyone has a chance to be surprised.
4. Schedule your next earthquake drill six months from now on your calendar (or as a repeating event if you use an e-calendar).

For extra credit, take San Francisco's goofy Quake Quiz to learn what to do if you are on BART or in a high rise building.

Extra stuff for parents of young children: 

• At night, the guidelines urge everyone to stay in their own bed until the shaking stops.  If you know you won't be able to stop yourself from running to your children, make sure the path between your room and theirs is clear of potential hazards. 
• Practice your earthquake drill with your children in all the different rooms of the house.  Where should they drop, cover and hold in each room?  
• If you have very small children who can't take cover by themselves, and who could be in different rooms from each other and from you, think through the different possible scenarios and plan what you will do.  For example, if the shaking starts while you are in the kitchen and the toddler is in her room and the baby is on the floor in the living room, what will you do?  Be extra vigilant about clearing potential hazards that could harm you or them before you get to them.