Earthquake!

There are supposedly hundreds of earthquakes a year in Costa Rica, most of them minor. Costa Rica is a hot spot due to the plate tectonics in this part of the world. As an aside, Rachel’s Grade 4 Social Studies class has been working quite a lot on the seismic origins of Costa Rica, and she had to memorize the names of the various volcanic ranges, the epochs when they first appeared, and the names of the various plates, etc. (All in Spanish, of course.) I was quite happy to help her with this homework because I found it quite interesting as well.

Anyway, several “larger” sized earthquakes have occurred while we have been here, but I hadn’t felt any of them. We would run into people in the shops or at school and they would say “Did you feel that one last night?”, and I would always have to say “no.” That is, until 2 nights ago.

Rachel and I were in our cabin and had just laid down, I was reading and she was playing her DS game. All of a sudden, she bolts up and says “What was that!!!”. By coincidence, the fridge had just started going and I thought that was what she was referring to. I started to say, “It’s just the fridge…” when I started to feel my bed move. It was as if somebody was under it and was shaking the leg trying to scare me.

It was the first time in my life I had actually felt the physical effects of an earthquake and it was really quite cool - exciting and unsettling at the same time. Instead of doing everything I’ve heard you’re supposed to do when an earthquake hits, I basically just laid in bed and rode it out. There was never a thought of getting out of the house, or down on the ground or anything like that. I would like to believe that the people who live here are better prepared than we are, and it made me think (for the millionth time) that as a parent, I am woefully unprepared for things I should be more aware of.

The paper the next day said the earthquake occurred just offshore of the town of Quepos which is on the pacific coast, just south of Jaco, maybe an hour’s drive away from us. Of the 2 monitoring organizations here, one reported the magnitude at 5.0, while the other reported 6.2 on the Richter scale. (Why the large difference, I’ll never know… Welcome to Costa Rica). There were no reports at all of any property damage or injuries, so I guess this, too, was a minor incident.

So, once all is said and done, the only lasting effect I’ll have of this episode is some lingering parental guilt for not having better prepared my kids for “the big one” (but I’ll get right on that, I promise…).