When the Ground Turned to Jello

This Friday the 31st of October, a quake hit the Aegean Sea, beside the Turkish city of Izmir. It toppled buildings and caused the water to pour in both on the Turkish mainland and on the Greek island of Samos. Sadly, the casualties are in the hundreds, with dozens of dead, mostly Turkish. 

According to the USGS, the quake hit the Richter scale at 7.0. Like Proust's madeleine, it is odd how a spare detail or two can conjure an entire world of memories. For any native of the California North Bay Area of a certain age, memories are jogged of another quake that occurred two weeks to the day, thirty-one years ago. 

This was the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, an event marked by indelible images of cars falling into gaps in broken freeways, millions of people evacuating a World Series game and numerous buildings, sometimes remarkable efforts later to restore institutions and businesses sorely affected by this event. "Where were you when the shift hit the land" indeed! This writer remembers vividly traffic lights swaying on the Alameda in San Jose, and stopping by the side of the road as that transient but unforgettable feeling of the ground turning to jello came yet again into his life.

Yet another memory, one even farther into time and space, was the Great Lisbon Earthquake, whose anniversary happens to fall today, All Saints' Day, 1755. A day when all of the populace and guests of Lisboa was primed to festively mark a great Catholic festival, only to find themselves put through a three and a half minute hell that saw the very ground underneath them break and swallow lives, the great waters of the Atlantic gush into the Great Plaza itself. Such was the strength of the quake, at 8.5 to 9.0 on the current scale, that for many years, it was the most powerful quake ever recorded. It is said that even lakes in North America roiled in the aftershock and a great tsunami is recorded by the then inhabitants of the Azores.  The final death count may never be known, but is believed to be around 30,000-50.000.

Every once in a while, we humans cloaked in our hubris at the civilization we created, are brought down to remember that we may exist on this earth, but we don't control it. Please extend your thoughts and prayers for the people of the Aegean, as they struggle to cope with the traumatic aftermath of this latest reminder. In situations such as this, small things make a bigger resonance than we can ever imagine.