Small earthquakes, or earthquakes where you are some distance from the epicenter so they feel small, are not bad at all. In fact, a friend of mine taught me to stand still and try to feel which way things are moving -- side to side, or up and down. Trying to pin that down helps with panic. But a really big quake is horrifying. I went through the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake that was something like a 7.2 or 7.4 when I was eight year old, and it literally took me months to get over it. Our twin beds had wheels and we had hardwood floors, and I woke up at around 5:00 in the morning when our two beds crashed together. Then the power lines a couple of miles away exploded and toppled, and my mom came rushing into the room screaming that we were being bombed. Well, you can tell where it went from there... Total hysteria! A big water tower near us also toppled over and the streets were flooded, and of course my teenage brother insisted we drive up to Tehachapi later that day to check things out. The hills all had huge cracks in them that people were examining, and some of them were up to 3 feet across and deeper than I could see. And then when we got to Tehachapi the main street looked like something had sheered off and split all the two-story buildings in half, and there were bathtubs and beds hanging out over the edge -- and people were killed there. Soooooo traumatic for this timid little kid that I was. It hit during August, and I literally spent every day after that outside sitting under our front yard tree because that was the only place I felt safe. Oh yes, and in September we had to go to a different school because ours was badly damaged by the earthquake.
