Daily Archives: September 6, 2012

We had a pretty big earthquake here Wednesday @ about 8:45 AM. They say it was a 7.6 to 7.8. We were all @ home, My Mother, Son, Myself, Aurea & our friend/translator/helper.  My Mother was helping me pack, when we felt the first wave……my Mum said “what was that?” Then I felt  more shaking, and the doors were rattling and I said. “Earthquake” and grabbed her hand, we grabbed my Son & Dog, Aurea & our friend [who had been moving boxes] and we made it outside away from the house & we sat on the ground. The shaking is like waves under the  earth, you can feel them. It shook for a few minutes, then stopped. Water was sloshing out of the pool, and we all just sat quiet for a minute. Then Aurea had hysterics, trying to call her daughter’s School, but the rest of us were calm. My Mum was like “wow” and I said that was a big one……in 2009 I was here in CR when they had the biggest Earthquake that they had had in almost 50 years,  it was a 6.1. and I was closer to the epicenter for that one. Yesterday the epicenter was on the Nicoya Peninsula, on the Pacific side [the gulf of  Nicoya separates the peninsula from the mainland] and it was about 45km [28 miles] deep. Now the shallower the quake, the more damage there is, usually in a smaller radius, but the deeper the quake, the farther away it is felt. They felt this one through Central America  from north of Nicaragua & all the way down through Panama. They issued a Tsunami alert for all of Central America, but later suspended it. We live about a 45 minute drive  west to the Pacific Ocean, so we were not that close, but man, it really shook here! There were a few landslides, but only 3 people died, 2 from heart attacks from shock, and one construction worker who was at a building site. Very fortunate that there were not more fatalities. The province of Guanacaste [where the epicenter was] is mostly beaches & touristy, though in-land it is much different, Farms, valleys, and the Monteverde cloud forest and Volcanoes.  The pix on the news showed that they had some damage there at the coast, but here we are fine. And about an hour after it happened, I went to my new house & checked everything and all was well. In our little town, people were chattering about it, but everyone was ok, not freaked out. Poor Aurea was frantic until she was able to reach her Daughter’s School on the phone [all lines were super busy right after the quake, everyone calling to make sure their loved ones were ok] but her daughter was ok, and they sent all of the children home from school [she lives in the town Alajuela, about a 35 minute drive from here] Her neighbor was going to pick up Aurea’s daughter , so she was fine, though my friend [who also called about their loved ones] said I should send Aurea home[and I did tell her she could just go & work the next day if she wanted to] but she refused. She did help pack up more stuff, and she did some cleaning & laundry. We have felt no aftershocks here, but at the beach there were a couple.

Funny how some people just flip out in an emergency [like Aurea] and how some like myself stay calm…….funny because I am the one with a “Mood Disorder” and you would think that someone like me would just wig out, but it’s the opposite…….I wig out over “stupid shit”, not the important stuff, though the “stupid shit” doesn’t seem so stupid to me at the time. Life is strange, huh?