Five years ago today I was in my office engrossed in my work in the early afternoon when things changed suddenly, and for me pretty permanently.
It so happened that my “boss”, a software tester with no management experience who had very recently made it into management by virtue of liberally padding his resume when changing jobs, was out of town on a business trip that I had managed to avoid and was heartily glad not to be on, having to pretend that the endless office politics and scheming were somehow interesting.
It was a pleasant afternoon outside, but I was really focused on the work at hand. Being left alone by management meant it was one of those comparatively rare times in recent years when a programmer is free to actually program instead of dealing with bureaucratic nonsense, and I like the actual work when I’m left alone to do it, so I was merrily pounding away on the keyboard and lost in thought. This was on the fourth and top floor of the office building, itself part of an “office park” complex. Since there had recently been a lot of very noisy and distracting work on the roof immediately above it was no surprise when the noise started up again, and I just tried to tune it out. That worked for maybe fifteen seconds.
The noises coming from the roof got strange, then there was a loud sound like gravel raining down on it from the sky. I had no windows nearby, and I actually thought that maybe the day had turned stormy and it was hailing. Then it got VERY loud, with banging and bumps dosed with heavy subsonics that were felt in the gut rather than heard, and then the building was indisputably… moving. Like the whole thing was gently swaying, being pulled away on a trailer. The noise did not abate, the movement was increasing if anything, and it seemed possible that the building was coming down.
It only took a second for me to decide to bail, before I even decided what was going on. One of my big take-aways from 9/11, one that I had shared with others as advice, was “ignore the voice on the PA system telling you to go back to your desk”. There were a LOT of lessons from 9/11, but that was a big one. When it hits the fan suddenly without warning, get out quick, don’t hesitate, keep going until you are far away, worry about anything, ANYTHING else later.
I locked my screen with one combination keystroke, grabbed my messenger bag and headed out to the hall. The people already out there were wandering around aimless, confused. One woman called out to me “What are we supposed to do?” and I called back that I was headed out of the building. I ignored the elevators (of course) and hit the stairwell. There were other people leaving that way, but we were all making pretty good time until we approached the ground floor exit. There things backed up, but only for a few seconds, and then I was out in the lobby with a lot of other people.
By that time I’d pretty well gotten my head around the idea that we were having an earthquake, and I knew that a big hazard was trying to leave the building as sheets of glass start coming down on the outside. There was plenty of glass on this building, but there was no sign of any falling and the shaking seemed to have stopped, so I headed for the doors. There was a concrete-and-steel awning of sorts over the main entrance, so I felt it was a reasonable choice even if glass started falling suddenly. I got away from the building and kept going until I was looking almost down on it from a nearby rise.
The swaying and movement I experienced on the top floor was apparently MUCH greater than that experienced by people on the lower floors, they were gathering on balconies and staring at the crowd forming in the driveways, apparently wondering why everyone was leaving the building. Lots of people had smart phones and were already calling out to each other about Richter scale numbers and epicenters- amazing, it had to have been less than five minutes.
I looked around, and realized that my vehicle was in a multi-level concrete parking garage of the exact type that you see collapsed and pancaked in video from any earthquake. It was almost the only place to park, there were only a couple of dozen spaces outside of the garage.
Time to apply that lesson again… just go. I hesitated but headed for my vehicle. I knew that a big shock right then could bring the whole thing down and kill me, but I didn’t know when that risk might end, and I was a long way from home. My commute was about 35 miles and over an hour on winding back-country roads, and I had suddenly realized how untenable my position would be without my vehicle. If what we had felt was a precursor, I didn’t want to be caught in a crowd when everyone else decided to leave.
I made my way to my vehicle without incident, fired it up and headed for the exit. When I got there two people were putting up traffic cones, apparently to keep anyone from leaving, I have no idea why. Maybe they were putting them up to keep anyone from coming in, but they were putting them on the exit side of the drive as well as the entrance side. I’m not sure they really believed rubber traffic cones were going to stop anyone… I sure didn’t think so. For whatever reason, one of them looked up at me, moved two of the traffic cones out of my way, and then put them back after I passed.
I drove out of the office complex to a quiet semi-rural road and up to the top of a hill, nothing over me, pulled over and started to make phone calls. It took a while, several attempts, and I moved once to a large, empty church parking lot, but I got through. Everyone okay but shaken. I said I was coming.
Time to apply the lesson yet again… just go. I knew that most people had already laughed it off and gone back into the building, but I, at least, don’t know how to tell a precursor from the main quake by feel.
I drove home, taking an hour to do so, thinking most of the way about a very tall brick chimney on one end of the house. When I got home there was little apparent damage, a handmade shelf that I’d tried to mount without drilling too many holes in it had gone cockeyed, spilling and damaging some reproduction pewter ware. I piece of fairly recently-installed crown molding had popped loose at one end. Nothing more.
When I got to work the next day, no one had apparently even noticed my absence. Okay. Zero downside for caution, this time. Not that it made much difference.
I replayed all this over and over in my mind in subsequent weeks and months. Even though from some viewpoints I had been “obsessed” with survival issues for most of my life, I had become complacent only ten years after 9/11. I had a little bit of gear in a duffle bag in the back of my vehicle, and more potentially useful odds and ends in a rear compartment and the glove compartment, but if there had been a couple more Richter points added on that day my vehicle would have been under a big pile of rubble, not only destroyed but inaccessible. I would have been 35 miles away from home, on foot, in the middle of a disaster area, completely reliant on whatever was actually on my person… and that wasn’t much.
I had a stainless water bottle (small neck, not very good for boiling water) and a small folding travel umbrella in my messenger bag, but not much else useful. I had on fairly flimsy shoes that would have been miserable to walk five miles in, much less 35. Being a knife person by nature I did have one in my pocket (one that had never seen the light of day in the office), but it was a SOG Aegis… light, handy, plenty for very civilized use, maybe some defensive value, but clearly inadequate and far too flimsy to be a good choice for survival use. No multi-tool. There was one in the glove compartment of my vehicle, but if the situation had been a little different that may as well have been on the moon. There was a tiny “peanut” lighter attached to my leather key-case, but I knew from experience that I’d be lucky to get a dozen lights from the fuel in it. I had a tiny plastic-handled ferrocerium rod with the Boy Scouts of America logo on it in my key-case as well, but it was the tiniest I’d ever seen, altogether smaller than a normal key. I had a shoulder bag full of electronic gadgets and work papers, not a pack.
All in all, a lot better than nothing, but there was absolutely nothing preventing me from having been much, much better prepared, and even five years earlier I would have been. The sheer routine and drudgery of various long commutes to work by various means had worn down any sense of vigilance, I had gotten lazy, and that day could ave been the one when it caught up to me. I took the lesson to heart.
Unfortunately, many months later and after I’d rectified much of that lack, my working situation changed again and I found myself working in a very restricted urban situation facing a long string of prohibitions and a gauntlet of armed guards, x-ray machines and metal detectors every day. To make that even more insane, I was taking the subway into work. There was no way to stash anything downtown, so anything on my person at the beginning of the long trip, through miles of dark underground subway tunnels under some very prime terrorist targets, would also to be on my person when I faced the armed guards, x-ray machines and metal detectors. My was no longer in parking lot just outside the building anymore- during the day my vehicle was in a parking lot about 25 miles away IF I could go through the middle of the city. If I couldn’t, I was probably facing 40 or 45 miles and two river crossings. On foot. In a disaster area.
I was there for two years. Nothing more than the routine continual subway failures ever happened, I never had to bail out on foot for more than the distance between two subway stations, but the insanity of the situation weighed on my mind the entire time. When I MOST needed to be prepared, when I was the most exposed, the authorities were also most intent on keeping me completely helpless.
Two years is a long time. I’ll write more about all that later, the things I learned, the things I did carry, the tentative plans I made, and maybe more about the insanity, which goes far, far deeper than I’ve mentioned. I still often think about the hundreds of thousands of people still in that position, forced into utter helplessness in an obviously precarious situation every day, month after month, year after year, made potential victims by the forces that are supposedly there to protect them.
I started toying with the idea of writing something about this yesterday, not realizing- or maybe my subconscious prodded me into thinking about it- but it wasn’t until I actually looked up something about that day that I realized that it was five years ago today.
There were many other things earlier in life that created and spurred my interest in survival subjects, but that was my most recent real wake-up call.
– Robert the Wombat