Surviving Earthquakes For Dummy: The Earthquake

Alex Lin

Mr.Carter

Class Title

23 November 2013

The Earthquake

Fire extinguisher. Check. Working flashlight. Check. Canned food. Check. These emergency necessities were part of the apartment supplies during one of the most traumatizing, memorable, and scary part of my life. Little did I know that a copy of “Surviving earthquakes for dummies” should have been part of this inventory as well. I was only six years old when this personal and natural disaster happened. We lived in a small, mildly sturdy seven-story apartment made of bricks.

Seated in my room doing homework, I heard a rumbling sound of huge tectonic plates shifting together in the seventh-floor our apartment. A moment later, my desk tipped over, spilling the Hey Song Sarsaparilla soda I had been drinking. This beverage is a Taiwanese version of American Root beer, except that it has more of a caramel and woody flavor. In fact, the entire building swayed from side to side. I did what the normal person would do: I dropped and covered and prayed.

The many disasters occur in Taiwan include flooding rainstorms, devastating thunderstorms, and occasional ravaging typhoons that run into the island on their way to China, plastering this small country. A tsunami might occasionally attack this small Asian island with the force of Neptune’s trident; covering up this small spot on the spinning space rock. Kaoshiung, an urban elevated area, did not usually experience these devastations, or perhaps did not suffer— although it has been struck by lightning once or twice before when a typhoon brushed against the coastline. Actually, the biggest danger was parasites which grow well in the hot humid climate, and of course, the disaster in which I was taking shelter from, the devast...

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...make that phone call—all that stuff. I also gave him my address, which I couldn’t remember right now, but I did back then. The officer then said that some firemen with axes would be coming. I waited and waited and waited and blew 10% of the battery on playing “Tetris” on my brother’s phone In about an hour or so, I heard some banging on the door and then a large hose completely obliterated the pile of rocks that originally seemed so large and unbreakable. And yes, the hose felt like an earthquake, which unhappily reminded me of my experiences in a trapped apartment The firemen sent me back outside, where I used the almost dead cellphone to call my brother. He was so scared that somebody found his cell phone that he thought it had been a prank call. He was very relieved when he found out that it was just me. In fact, both of us were happy just to see each other again.