An earthquake shook my garden

I was sitting in my garden reading a book when the ground started to move last Sunday. I was feeling the effects of a 7.2 earthquake that was happening about 250 kilometres away, in Baja, Mexico.

Earthquakes happen here all the time. But most of them are so small that we don’t feel anything. The last really big earthquake to hit Los Angeles was the Northridge earthquake in 1994. It did $20 billion of damage, killed more than 70 people and injured thousands more.

Fortunately, I’ve only felt a few earthquakes since I moved to LA five years ago. One time I woke up in the middle of the night and jumped out of bed because the whole room was shaking. That was scary but it’s nothing compared to what people experience when they’re near the epicentre of a big earthquake, like the one in Haiti in January, which killed more than 200,000 people.

Even the earthquake in Baja killed a few people. One man there died when his house fell down around him. I was lucky to be so far away. All I felt was the ground shaking for about half a minute. And then it stopped.