I was in an office tower in Santa Clara, about half way up, on the sixth floor. The building swayed so much I thought it would pitch over and kill me. But the valley had gotten off easy compared to the Santa Cruz Mountains. My brother's home looked like a giant toddler and played with it for half an hour before putting it down again. If we had gotten that kind of treatment in Santa Clara I wouldn't be able to write about it.

That earthquake shook me deeply. It's not a coincidence that I now live on a whole different tectonic plate.

5.x earthquakes are not “stress relievers”, that is a common fallacy.

You seem to be writing to correct the commenter above, but in fact the commenter is correct. Because the M scale is logarithmic, you need a lot of M5's to release energy equivalent to an M6. So, the M5's aren't helping to suppress the M6's. A few seconds of searching will turn up authoritative sources on this oft-heard misconception.

Ah I see. Thanks!

I flew to the bay area for the first time in spring of '90 for a business trip. I was driving in my rental car with my paper street map(s). I went to cross the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and, well, a lot of was gone because of the quake.

Was in the Santa Cruz area at football practice in 1989. My knees were in my face. We were not able to go into our house for a week until it was determined safe. Us and all our neighbors camped in our front yards and had a huge block party. The community was left to fend for ourselves with no water and no power but everyone coming together. Grocery stores opening with no power letting in like 20 people at a time. It was probably the most a part of a community I ever felt in California. Hiking Nisene to see the epicenter was cool. Me and some other football players went around looking for people that could use overexcited football linemen teenager help. We moved so many trees/branches, and were feed so much BBQ steak (no power so everything in fridges was getting grilled up and shared).

So funny that you say this... my grandfather in Saratoga CA - he went "oh I forgot something" and ran back into the house and came out with a bar-full of things in his arms and served Gin-n-tonics to all the neighbors on their lawn just after the quake (my grandfather was a nuke eng that built nukes for GE at the time, but was a really funny norwegian punster... and he knew how to make everything a party)

> but I wonder if the seasonal shift in temperatures affect earthquakes.

This one was 4 miles deep. That would be surprising.

You'd need like a hundred 5.1s to "relieve the geo-stress".

I caught a much smaller one when I was young and had the exact same reaction your dad did, sitting in a parking lot with no one around. I had a better excuse than him: I was in central Indiana, and who ever heard of a quake there?

(No, not looking forward to another New Madrid quake.)

The stories of the New Madrid quakes are insane. The earth was literally rolling, fissures opened up spewing enough gases to block out the light and more. And the aftershocks went on for months. Hard to imagine.