‘I realized it was a shaker’
Published 2:17 pm Thursday, October 2, 2008
In years to come, Valley residents will always remember the answer to the question, “Where were you when the 6.8 quake hit?”
Whether at work, at home, driving on the road or taking a walk, Feb. 28’s earthquake reminded everyone that there is a force out there larger than mere mortals.
Jolene Kelly and her husband, Bart, were taking a walk near the Mill Pond in Snoqualmie when the earth started to shake.
“Bart heard a noise and looked at me odd, but we didn’t think anything about it until trees started falling and everything started rolling,” she said. “We heard everything falling and it looked like a movie where a scene is filmed with the camera shaking; everything was blurry. We were holding each other up, not knowing which way to run.”
“The ground was like Jell-O, you could see it just roll,” Bart said. “The trees on one side started falling, the old, dead ones, so I thought we’d run away from those, and then we got to the road and the power lines were swinging like jump ropes. They started touching together and exploding. So we decided to take a chance on being near the trees.” After the shaking stopped, the Kellys ran toward town.
“My initial reaction, and I know everybody says this, is that this was the ‘big one,’ because we were around trees falling and power lines exploding,” Jolene added. “Where we were and because of the experience, we thought the town would be destroyed,” she added.
But Snoqualmie, as well as the rest of the Valley, wasn’t completely destroyed, just a bit cracked and messy inside homes and stores.
“You should’ve seen the windows, they were shaking and rolling, and you could hear them, too, almost like bells tinkling,” said Don Oster, a Realtor at Maguire Hill in downtown North Bend. Oster was on the phone with a Seattle client when the quake began, and by the time the client started to tell him an earthquake was occurring, Oster felt the tremors.
“The ironic thing is when we came out of here, there wasn’t a car in the street. People were running from the buildings out into the street and not even looking,” he added.
Nearby, Mount Si Dry Cleaners owner Debi Lee and her employees were in the back of the building when they realized what was happening.
“You could see the floor buckling. You could see it rolling. It rolled all the way out to the street,” Lee said. “It was kind of exciting.
“I thought a big truck was going by until I saw the floor rolling, then I realized it was a shaker,” she added.
Suspended light fixtures and clothes-hanging rods shook violently, and Lee literally followed her buckling floor as it rolled along. She and employee Dina Benjamin quickly turned off the gas boiler and other appliances because they realized if the boiler were to explode, it could take out the whole block.
Benjamin is from California, and this was the twentieth earthquake she has experienced.
“It was kind of scary. I was in disbelief that it was happening here,” she explained. Although the quake could have been dangerous, Lee said it’s an experience to respect. “You can’t control it. You can either be afraid or embrace it. It’s a thing of nature.”
The quake seemed to pick and choose what businesses to hit. The supply of windshields at Somerset Auto Glass was left intact, as were cars at Chaplin’s North Bend Chevrolet and Oldsmobile. The interior at Chaplins, however, was a different story. The building suffered major-structural damage.
North Bend officials had their share of shakes at City Hall, which had to be evacuated because of cracking.
“I was yelling at everyone to get under their desks,” said Mayor Joan Simpson. Simpson joined police and fire officials at the King County Sheriff’s Department North Bend substation to assemble the Emergency Operations Center. Simpson said she was pleased that the city’s water supply – an artesian well at the base of Mount Si – was not damaged by the quake.
After the quake, people who drove around to see what was damaged probably noticed a crumbling chimney on Park Street in Snoqualmie. James Pinkley, who lives in the house with the damaged chimney, ran outside once the quake began.
“It was pretty noisy, the houses were making lots of noise and there was noise from the slide of the mountain. I actually heard it before I felt the shaking,” he said. “At first it sounded like someone upstairs dropped a bowling ball, and I know they say you’re supposed to stay inside, but it sounded like the house was going to fall apart so I thought it would be safer outside.”
Pinkley added that it was difficult to stand up during the earthquake.
“It was similar to standing in a small boat on rough water, but it was more side to side than up and down. I was surprised that there wasn’t more damage all over town.” The remainder of Pinkley’s chimney has been roped off and will be demolished .
Many homeowners and stores alike spent the majority of last Wednesday evening and all day Thursday cleaning up.
“It’s a hell of a way to get you to clean your cupboards,” said Colleen Johnson, Snoqualmie Councilwoman. Johnson held onto her fish tank during the earthquake, to prevent further cleanup.
At the Snoqualmie Market, cleanup was tedious, since workers had to not only clean up broken bottles once filled with wine, pickles and other goods, but had to reshelve most of the stock.
“The odor in here was so overwhelming,” explained grocery store employee Toni Lee. “We just did it, we just all jumped in and helped. We swept and got out garbage bags. You do what you have to do.” The store was cleaned up and opened within three hours, and aside from a crack that runs across the length of the store and up the wall, there is no evidence of the earthquake’s wrath.
Last week’s quake was no surprise to one Fall City resident. Suzie McAneny had felt that an earthquake was coming soon. She believes she’s psychic, but doesn’t always refer to herself in those terms.
“I’ve had this psychic ability and I don’t use it, I just use what God wants me to use,” she said. “I’ve always been able to feel [earthquakes], and my immediate family has always known about it. I keep telling my family if I could come up with the Lotto numbers, we could be rich.,”
A few days before the Feb. 28 quake, she had a feeling it was coming, and started cleaning shelves and putting breakable items in safer places. On 6 a.m. the morning of the event, McAneny had an odd feeling while driving up State Route 202 to go to Ken’s Restaurant at Seattle East Truck Town, where she’s the kitchen manager. She wasn’t sure what the feeling meant at the time.
In addition, when driving past the part of the road that was later damaged, she had a sudden feeling that it was not a good area to be driving on, and later told her husband that they should start taking the interstate. Just a few hours later, nobody would be able to drive that route.
McAneny also predicted Feb. 14’s 3.1-magnitude earthquake.
“I was sitting upstairs at my computer and I looked at my boss, Brian Lazerus, and I told him, ‘We’re going to have an earthquake,'” she said. “Then hours later, he called me and said ‘You’re too much for me, Suzie.'” Besides cleanup, another inconvenience for residents was the disappearance of their animals. Some families are still searching for their pets. Doreen McNeely of North Bend was feeding horses in a pasture behind the ranger station in North Bend when the event began.
“When the quake started, they started running, then they stopped to see what everybody else was doing,” she said. “I’m glad to have been out there instead of a building, although the ground shook so bad. It hit a red barn and kept shaking, and moved its way across the field. It was pretty wild.” McNeely said an older horse that was in the barn came running out.
“He’s so old, he can’t even see that well and he can’t hear that well so I can’t imagine what he was thinking,” she added. “He wouldn’t eat his oats after that.”
