After a recent disaster warning, Teresa Gaines shares how she felt unprepared.
Recently in California, we received a tsunami warning. A few years were startled off of my lifespan when my iPhone’s emergency alert system threw my heart out of its already tachycardic rhythm. Within seconds, Snapchat message notifications joined the chorus of terrible tones, as friends checked in to see if you got the alert too.
No, we were not experiencing the phenomenon of mass hysteria — there was, in fact, a blanket tsunami warning for our various Bay Area hometowns. As I live alone now in my late twenties, I immediately took the appropriate emergency action: I Googled.
I learned about the National Tsunami Warning Center, a website which is apparently not a site to discuss the waves of populist rhetoric that flood our democratic republic. The site informed me that a series of earthquakes had just been measured in Humboldt County and off the coast of Northern California and Oregon.
At that moment, I felt envy for the environmental security that people in Delaware must revel in every morning that they wake up. Because unlike one of the states with the fewest natural disasters, California is just biding its time before the Big One. And since God fancies himself a comedian, he decided to throw in a quirky punchline: our skyscrapers aren’t going to come tumbling down and the Bay Bridge won’t be crumbling beneath commuters. We may just find ourselves Googling the cost of ark-building materials.
There are so many ways in which I failed to prepare for this. How quickly can Amazon deliver cat life jackets? Do I have a cantankerous yet dutiful neighbor with access to a private plane that I can coincidentally cross paths with, as Hollywood movies have taught me to expect? As my mind began to flood with disaster scenarios, I picked my phone up again, only to learn that the tsunami warning had just been cancelled. Scientists said that if there was a tsunami, waves would likely be reduced after coming under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the San Francisco Bay.
No tsunami this time, other than the one I just barely survived. I wonder if I can call in sick due to the trauma I’ve just experienced? With a Perspective, I’m Teresa Gaines.
Teresa Gaines is a Vallejo native with degrees in psychology and journalism. She is passionate about working with children facing adversity, singing at open mic nights and her two cats, Mojojojo and Cleopatra.