Lucky

I may have mentioned before that I have lived in a lot of different places. I don’t know if this is a cause or an effect but I have also been around when several natural disasters have occurred.

Three of the most powerful earthquakes to happen in the last twenty years have happened where I was. I’ll be more specific:

October 18th 1989 I lived in Hayward (East side San Francisco Bay) and worked in San Francisco. I finished work early that day, crossed the Bay Bridge and headed south on Hwy 880. I got home just in time to open a beer turn on the TV in my room and watch the end of the Pre-Game show for the first game of the World Series. At about 5:oopm it hit. The world started rolling like tug boat in a gale causing a small tsunami in my water bed which tossed me to the floor where I was just in time to catch the (Thankfully Small) TV as it fell off it’s stand. That was pretty much it for my personal part of the excitement. I got the heck out of town as soon as possible.

January 17th 1994 4:31 in the morning I was living in Los Angeles when the same waterbed had another tsunami. This one hit at a different angle and I didn’t fall out of bed, but I did have to jump up to deal with a couple of terrified Shar Peis who had no clue what was going on. A lot of stuff was broken, again, time to move on.

February 28th 2001 10:30 or so. I was living in a Town House in Kent, Washington (Just south of Seattle) when that same old feeling hit me again. It was a gentler rolling this time but it seemed to keep going for a much longer time. It gave me a lot of time to contemplate where I was and what was happening. I was on a "Down Week" from Bell Labs which is why I was at home instead of off some where working. I had just got out of the shower and was standing in the hallway between the bath and the bedroom holding a towel and nothing else. This time I was just looking at the waterbed with the waves crashing back and forth across it. I couldn’t leave town for a while, my wife was very ill and her doctors were there.

Now the Loma Prieta (San Francisco) quake was a 6.9, the Northridge (Los Angeles) a 6.7 and the Nisqually (Seattle) quake a 6.9 although at the time they told us it was a 9.1

The cost of these three quakes was over 52 billion dollars.

OK, So, Here is the question… If I take this story to the Governor of Alabama and offer to move away from the state for some as yet undisclosed sum of money, would this constitute an attempt at extortion?

Uncle Dave