Cup of Cha
This is China

One of the scariest parts of what turned out to be a relatively minor earthquake (4.0) in Beijing today was that no one had any idea of what was going on, and there a million possible explanations–none of them pleasant. At first I thought I was dizzy, but after a moment a colleague asked if the room was shaking. At that point I stopped reading the article I had been working on about disaster preparedness (you can’t make this stuff up) and we all got the hell out of the building.

The second scary part was thinking about all of the additional things that could go wrong. While I descended down the 19 flights of stairs, still having no idea about what the cause might be, I started to get very nervous as workers poured into the small space and the stairwell grew more and more crowded. People were mostly pretty calm, but I suspected any more shaking would cause panic, and give how many people there were and how high up we stood, the potential for disaster seemed significant. I wondered if anyone else felt like I did: I couldn’t tell whether or not things were still shaking.

In the lobby I made sure not to walk under any of the enormous chandeliers, which were gently swaying, at least five minutes after the initial shock. Outside people were standing oddly close to the building. It seemed to me that they would still be in a perilous situation should something big happen. And then my mind started to think about all of the dangers and possibilities. It was hard to tell if people had left any other buildings in the area. That made me worry that there was something specifically wrong with my office. When I called a friend in Beijing who said she hadn’t noticed anything I got really nervous. I work directly above the subway, so perhaps, I thought, something may have collapsed underground. I talked to one guy in from the building who had been in the basement and hadn’t felt anything. He thought it was just a couple of scared guards that had cleared the place, so clearly it made a huge difference how high up you were.

After a few minutes, a reporter whom I had texted informed me that there had in fact been an earthquake–in Chongqing (it was later determined to have been in Wenchuan County). The sheer distance away made me extremely anxious. I’ve never heard of an earthquake shaking buildings thousands of miles away.

Then I started looking out into the distance where I could see Beijing’s tallest building going up. There was no sign of damage, but in a city full of cranes, it can be fairly scary to imagine what may have already happened. As my mind wandered, it went to the CCTV Tower, a building so oddly designed that it seems particularly prone to this type of disaster. A few months back I joked about how it would one day fall over, but thinking about that today, it seemed particularly unfunny.

Fortunately, I biked to work today, even though it was somewhat drizzly. What seemed like a bad decision this morning, was comforting as I headed off to complete my workday on my laptop at home. I frequently take the subway the two stops from the office to home, but today I was more than a little relieved not to be going into an underground cavern. Had I not biked today, I would have walked home, most likely. After September 11th it took me about three weeks before I was willing to get back on a NYC subway.

In Beijing today, the events were more scary than actually dangerous, at least in my office. Reports are still just trickling out of Sichuan, but amazingly, as of this writing, it sounds like damage was relatively minor considering the quake registered nearly an 8 [update: as suspected, the death toll estimates have changed considerably}. Among the cities that experienced tremors were Shanghai, Zhengzhou, Lanzhou, Wuhan, Chongqing and Chengdu. If you look on a map that’s most of the country.

It looks like we were never in much danger today in Beijing, but standing in a crowded staircase minutes after your building shook, it sure didn’t feel that way.

Tags: earthquake
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