Powerless against the force of nature

May 14 2008 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

‘As an Ulsterman it pains me to say this, but during that long quake, I had been scared’

YOU never forget your first earthquake.

As news came in on Monday of the terrible carnage from the quake which killed thousands of people in China, I couldn’t help but think back to my first tremor.

It was March 31, 2002 and I had been living in earthquake-prone Taiwan for nearly two months.

It was a Sunday and I had gone to visit my friend Marcus in his eighth-floor flat.

After a night’s revelry, he was sprawled across the sofa in what I can only describe as a relaxed position. He started telling me about the Premiership match he had been watching in the bar the previous night.

It had been a humdinger, with Man United beating Leeds 4-3.

Marcus was just describing Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s second goal, which had made it 3-1, when the earth began to move.

There was a second’s delay, and then we both realised what was going on. We leapt into adjacent doorways and held on to the frames.

And then we waited. Five seconds of shaking, then 10, then 15.

As the room shuddered we both tried to give the impression that we weren’t too worried.

But the air was filling up with expletives - rather like the Examiner newsroom as deadline approaches.

No panic, but a distinct sense of unease.

I don’t know how long the quake lasted but it seemed like quite a while.

Finally the shuddering ended.

Elsewhere in the capital Taipei five people lay dying after a crane fell off the building which, when completed the following year, would become the tallest in the world.

Hundreds had been injured and several buildings had collapsed.

The 3-31 quake, as the Taiwanese dubbed it, registered 6.8 on the Richter scale and was the strongest on the island since 1999 when a 7.6 tremor killed more than 2,400 people.

And that’s the thing about major earthquakes - once they get started you never know how much havoc they’re about to wreak.

You just hold on and hope for the best.

It gives you a deep sense of your own powerlessness against the massive force of nature being unleashed below ground.

You have no idea whether you’re about to acquire an anecdote, a scar or a headstone.

When the trembling stopped, Marcus returned to the sofa - he’s an unflappable sort - and I headed back to my own flat to see if there was any damage.

As I walked along the street I found myself smiling at everyone I passed. And they were smiling back at me.

It was the elation of surviving a moment of danger intact. Or as Churchill once said: “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.”

Back at my glamorous apartment I found no real damage so I returned to Marcus’s flat and we were soon joined by some other foreigners who lived in the area.

We sat there talking about the quake and waiting for aftershocks - which are often more deadly than the original tremor.

Bizarrely, I remember one of the girls, who was English, informed us that the Queen Mother had died that day.

There were more earthquakes to come during my time in Taiwan, but none as big as 3-31.

As an Ulsterman it pains me to say this, but during that long quake, I had been scared.

Not “curl up in the foetal position and cry” scared, but certainly worried enough.

Later on, when I remembered that day it made me think of God - though not in the way that you might think.

I wondered at how terrifying it must have been for primitive people, living thousands of years ago, to experience things like earthquakes.

Scientific knowledge had been some comfort to me during the tremor. I knew what was going on, that the tectonic plates were shifting deep beneath the ocean.

But someone who lived before the era of scientific knowledge would have had no such comfort.

They would just be minding their own business - maybe doing a spot of hunting and gathering or painting on their cave wall - and the earth would suddenly shudder.

As humans we need explanations - so primitive people must have convinced themselves that some God or other had made the ground tremble, that He must have been angry and that perhaps some kind of goat sacrifice might quell the Big Man’s rage.

Perhaps, I’m wrong. Maybe there is an all-powerful, all-seeing God up there.

But the awful loss of life in China this week strongly suggests otherwise.