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I lived in Calif for 16 years. Been through lots of the little ones.
On Jan 17, 1994 at 4:30 AM the Northridge quake struck and my house was on a ridge overlooking the whole valley out in Calabasas about 3 miles from the epicenter. I'll tell you, in all my life I've never felt anything so violent as that quake. Nothing scares me usually, but that fucker scared the living hell out of me.
I think the scary part was there wasn't a buildup where we were. It was just this horrendously powerful upward thrust and bone penetrating pressure wave. I didn't even think it was a quake at first. My initial thoughts were holy shit LA just got nuked. I ran to the window expecting to see a mushroom cloud.
It felt like a giant just grabbed our house and kicked it up into the air.
My house got all fucked up. The entire foundation lifted up and moved about 6 inches and we had huge earthquake bolts on this home and this was about 9,000 sq. ft in size. My garage actually separated structurally from the violent shake. All my fountains, pool and waterfall got fucked up. Every single thing in my home office got tossed into the middle of the room. All of our plates and glasses shattered. All the big screens fell over. Our front doors which had enormous brass locks twisted like they were paperclips. The glass on the showers all broke. It was such a mess we didn't even know where to begin to clean it up. My wife and I were completely numbed and spaced out for a week.
When they said this wasn't the big one, I said to my wife that's it time to move back east which we did 6 months later.
I still have flashbacks to this day and that's 11 years ago. I have dreams of it still and wake up with in a cold sweat like its happening again. Its like you can't get that energy out of your soul its so strong.
I'll take my Florida hurricanes over earthquakes gladly thank you.
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