Brit In TN

Just enough time for the person monitoring the equipment to tap the screen and mutter "Now what's wrong with this bloody thing."

md95065

Or, more likely, "So that's why the cat ran out of the room two minutes ago" ...

CAdreaming

we are in Tri Valley - about 60 miles away from Napa - hubby woke at 3.30am and felt it - said it felt like a 3.0 here
Me - i slept thro it all!! I also tho slept thro the 87 Hurricane in the UK!! No damage here at all

We had a lot when i lived in Eureka including a 6.something recently - the epicenter of them was always out to sea hence not much damage thank goodness

I guess its part of CA life but scary non the same
I wish all who are affected well

Hawkini

I live about 30 miles away from Napa - woke both myself and my wife up - kids slept through it - I honestly thought someone was grabbing our bed to wake us up - lots of stuff moving about but nothing more than that.

Pulaski

Me too (in London, SW20), I only discovered when I woke up and my clock radio went off then went silent when the power failed (it had a loose power cord, which could usually be fixed by wiggling the cord where it plugged in to the radio, but not that day). I got up and looked out of my window into the street where I could see three trees down and branches were blowing down the road like tumbleweed in a western.

Sally Redux

I have told this story before, but I just went to work as usual, thinking, "this place gets messier every day!" (N19). Only 2 of us made it in and we were commended for exceptional effort

Steve_

I remember once I was playing some FPS video game on the internet at some ungodly hour and I was just getting to a juicy bit where mayhem was taking place and the house started shaking. For a second I was like, "wow this game is awesome!" And then it dawned on me that it was an earthquake.

I've slept through hurricanes too.

Giantaxe

The major damage from Loma Prieta in SF and Oakland was in areas where significant liquefaction occurred, which is often as big a factor as actual proximity to the epicenter.

This quake woke me up. I knew it was quite large due to the time it lasted. But compared to Loma Prieta - which was absolutely terrifying - I quickly realized this wasn't anywhere near as strong. About 10 times less strong in fact...

Michael

Downtown Santa Cruz fell down because the brick buildings weren't reinforced but downtown San Jose's brick buildings also weren't reinforced and there was little damage. The Marina had a lot of problems because liquefaction occurred but Forster City didn't even though it is built on landfill.

I suspect a lot has to do with the way the waves are propagated.

Giantaxe

The fill in the Marina was dumped to form land for the Pacific Exposition. Foster City is much more recent and from a time where the liquefaction issues of poorly compacted fill were known.

md95065

Actually the downtown area in Santa Cruz is also almost entirely built on landfill.
The San Lorenzo river used to flood that entire area every year until levees were built in the late 19th / early 20th century.

Certainly the buildings which suffered the worst damage were ones built prior to about 1940 which had little in the way of reinforcement. The more modern buildings suffered damage that was, in many cases, not practical to repair but they did not collapse.