The "Easter Earthquake"

The desert wildflowers were beautiful, on Easter Sunday, just a few days ago. The spot where these flowers bloomed is quite close to the epicenter of the 7+ magnitude earthquake that shook Baja and Southern California. We left the Anza-Borrego Desert flowers about one hour before the earth moved and shook everybody up. As we drove over the Coronado Bay Bridge, just before reaching what used to be a toll plaza, I felt the car behave oddly. It felt like a flat tire or a bad section of road. The shaky feeling passed quickly. When we got home and about 30 minutes after coming off the bridge, we felt a big aftershock. Obviously, that strange driving sensation was one of the effects of the quake.

Nothing broke and everyone we know is fine. Kids called to check in as did other friends and family members from around the country. After all the devastating news from Haiti and Chile a 7+ magnitude quake is serious business.

In the 25 years I have lived in California, earthquakes have happened fairly regularly. Mostly, they are minor. As a newsman, I helped cover two large, deadly, destructive quakes, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that hit the San Francisco Bay Area, and the 1994 Northridge quake that did its damage in and around Los Angeles. Sunday's quake was intense but centered in a mostly rural area, but not entirely. The border towns of Calexico, California, and Mexicali, Baja California, sit very close to the epicenter. And, as one local expert predicted on one local news outlet, there were deaths associated with the latest rumbling along the earth's fault lines. Two people have died. The latest news is that some--who can--are choosing to leave northern Baja. But things are getting back to normal despite substantial damage in certain parts of the desert border region.

Earthquakes wake us up. Unlike other destructive natural phenomena, they hit suddenly almost always with no warning. All we can do is be prepared and grateful that our First World building codes and practices provide a level of safety that mitigates the might of mother nature. And we hope the next time family and friends call, after we make the national news, we can report we are okay and share stories about desert wildflowers and that shaky feeling on the bridge, or whatever is happening then.