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kachapopopowtoday at 3:41 PM4 repliesview on HN

When I was in japan the earthquakes were oddly exciting rather than scary, had three different ones while I was there that visibly shook rather heavy objects around. Two being in a building and one outside.

It was rather interesting seeing things shift around leaving a permanent imprint that there was in-fact an earthquake and it wasn't some kind of illusion when earthquakes these size couple of decades ago would cause non zero amount of damage.

Although, I am scared for tokyo about the predicted earthquake that would push all these systems near the breaking point and even beyond it, but hopefully the past in not prediction of the feature and instead it'll just be a lot of smaller earthquakes.


Replies

cedwstoday at 8:33 PM

I was secretly hoping for a 'proper' earthquake when I was living in Japan. Obviously I didn't want anybody to get hurt or anything to get damaged, but I only ever got to feel a few ~M3 earthquakes which were just slight bumps I felt when laying in bed.

jacquesmtoday at 3:46 PM

Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction. Things I had taken for granted all my life suddenly became un-anchored and as a result so did I. I have never felt an actual feeling of panic that threatened to overwhelm me before that happened and it was a very mild earthquake. I had to really force myself to calm down and stay rational and do what was the safest rather than to give in to the 'flee' reflex.

The problem with earthquakes is when they start you know you're in one but you have no idea where you're headed, whether this is as bad as it gets or whether you're going to end up in a pile of collapsed rubble and what is the best decision greatly hinges on something you can't know ahead of time, which is the peak magnitude and the kind of earthquake you are experiencing.

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dyauspitrtoday at 7:07 PM

I lived in California for a while. I’ve always found earthquakes exciting. Probably because I trust the building codes and the ones I experienced were pretty mild.