The Emporia Gazette

May 28, 2012

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Here in Kansas we’re well acquainted with the Fujita scale, and now we are learning the drama, but not yet the limits, of the Richter scale.

Earthquakes, aftershocks, seismic waves. Until earlier this month, these were things that happened to people on other parts of the planet.

We’ve assumed here in Middle America, land of dependable earth, that we were somehow immune to ground-shifting. We were wrong. The earth has now trembled beneath our Kansas feet; there’s a new game in town.

The tornado is our well-worn mascot of disaster. We know its ways. We’ve spent the springs of our lives watching for funnels in the southwestern sky. When the sirens sound, it is second nature to go underground, or to step, with a resigned sigh, into the bathtub with pillows to cover our heads, just in case the walls actually are sucked away from us this time.

We’ve grown up with warnings, rotating clouds, and airborne debris. We are familiar with squall lines, wall clouds, and local TV weathermen who take off their suit jackets at 10:30 p.m., as nights of supercell events drag into their sixth consecutive hour.

Away from home during a tornado watch, when the skies seem particularly vengeful, it occurs to us to look for shelter in advance, and, if we’re out on the road, we know to drive at a right angle from a funnel cloud.

Earthquakes are a different story. New game, new rules. Or perhaps I should say: no rules.

Natural earthquakes have no season. They can occur any month, day or night. And the skies, sunny or cloudy, have no sway over the shifting of tectonic plates. Earthquakes offer no watches and there are no faithful meteorologists to guide us through red-blobbed weather maps in the evenings. Just bang! Buildings shake, walls crack, and things fall down.

Could we please go back to the tornado-only scenario again? Seriously, do we need earthquakes in our lives? Our plates are full. Broken perhaps, but full.

And, since many of us Kansans don’t know our way around these things, I imagine that there are earthquake myths that we will absorb unknowingly and follow, just like we used to follow various tornado admonitions, such as: before going into your basement, open the windows so that your house doesn’t explode.

I once heard a meteorologist counter this old thought with, “If a tornado wants your windows open, it will open them for you.”

I’ve always been comforted by the fact that with our most persistent nemesis, the tornado, we could either run from it or hide underground. Earthquakes, on the other hand, leave us without options or armor.

My first earthquake experience ever was on Nov. 5th. At home in Emporia, I was wakened by the bed shaking side to side. Folks, let me tell you, that is one weird feeling. It’s spooky, in the dead of night, to have the bed shake on its own. I thought I was in a Stephen King movie.

Now this wasn’t a violent shake, just a surprise shake. And then it was over. Two days later, a similar experience, only I was sitting up and wide awake during that quake.

And this week I’ve been examining our old plaster walls, wondering whether that particular crack on the kitchen wall is new.

Is this one of those rare things — an Oklahoma earthquake that accidentally spilled over into the land of Kansas? Like armadillos and killer bees, will the quakes move north? And once you give an inch of land to an earthquake, will it take out a bridge?

Time will tell.

But at least in landlocked Kansas, we’re definitely safe from tsunamis.

At least, I think we are.

“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net. Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.