Taiwan 4.0
I was awake instantly at 05:10 this morning. At first I did
not know why. I had a mental image of a circular disk and a voice that said, “Of
course!” This was meaningless to me. Then I heard a sound in the distance, as
of metal ripping like the skin of a kettle drum tearing the way I thought it
would sound should Thor take his sword in two hands, thrust it down into the
centre, and draw it towards him. Like that. Then, a fraction of a second later,
the building shook. The windows rattled and I felt my bed move. The sound of
tearing metal was repeated. The two occurred so closely together they were
probably the same sound interrupted by some blockage. Just before it ceased,
but only a second after awaking, I knew it was an earthquake. I sorted the
sensations I had experienced: the sounds, the building shaking. I had heard the
roof moving, the windows rattle and ground shifting or splitting, but the
latter was an impression rather than identifying a distinct sound because I
have never been present when the earth actually split.
The whole experience could not have exceeded five seconds. I
glanced at the clock and wondered about possible aftershocks and possible
damage to buildings, mine being okay, and then I was asleep again before I knew
it.
Eleven minutes later it happened again.
This time my mind formed an impression of a monstrous dragon’s
claw jabbed into rock and drawn towards me, as again I heard the sound approach
as if from a distance. I was awake instantly as before and this time I knew it
was a quake. It seemed about the same intensity but it did not last as long,
just a stab and rip then, gone. I was aware that there had been atexture to the
sound, or rather the sound suggested that the rip was ragged as if through
material of varying strength and consistency, instead of a uniform sheet of
something, so much data in a brief acoustic experience, yet it should not be
surprising. After all, we can identify by name, the many and various
instruments we hear in one staccato burst of an orchestra playing a single chord.
We retain in short term memory so much sense data than can be sifted through on
reflection so that we can express what we have heard or felt.
Afterwards, I looked up the quake on the government website
at http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V7e/earthquake/
And I discovered that the first quake was centred only 5
kilometres from me at a depth of 12.9km. The second one was 12 kms away in the
same region and 15.9kms deep. I have never been just 5kms from the centre of an
earthquake before. This was magnitude 4.0. In 1998 I had been 10k from a 2.6
magnitude quake in volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. I
actually saw the seismograph recording the next day, but this one was in my
bedroom so to speak. A quake that big extends along a fault line. It is not
pinpointed, so the earth may have shifted directly below my building today.
The government website shows two quakes at different locations
but in the same region. The fault lines beneath Taiwan are so numerous it is as
though the island is resting on a jumble of boulders in a pit that keeps
shifting. They move in different directions, and often, creating many small
quakes. Just as well, because the many small quakes release the energy over
time sparing us from mammoth city destroying quakes we can only imagine like
Alaska in 1964 or San Francisco in 1906 or Northridge, L.A. in 1994, which
occurred 21 years ago next month, January 17, which happens to be my birthday.
Fifty-seven people died in the Northridge quake. There are earthquakes all over
Taiwan, small ones, almost every day, but today it happened to be under my
house. Fortunately, my dwelling is only single storey and solid but flexible,
so I am not worried about being buried under tons of rubble. Nonetheless I felt
a moment of fear both times this morning. It adds to the excitement of living
here.
