I was in the office, on the 9th floor of a high-rise building in downtown Bellevue working late. It was about 9:00 pm. I was sitting at the computer as usual and I heard the miniblinds shake a little bit. I thought “what the hell is that?” I figured some cleaning guy had bumped into the wall outside my office. I got up to go to the door to see what was going on, when the floor moved out from under me. The whole room moved. It was like being at sea.
I continued to stagger toward the door and by the time I got to the hall, the whole building shuddered. “Holy shit!” I said. “It must be an earthquake!” I grabbed my wallet and keys off the desk and headed for the stairs.
The stairs were marked by an emergency use only sign. “I guess this counts as an emergency,” I thought, but by the time I got there, the building had stopped moving. I hit the elevator button from force of habit, and while I was deciding whether to go down the stairs and set off the alarm, the elevator doors opened, and believe it or not, there was a guy in it! I said, “do you think it’s really a good idea to take the elevator down?” Looking back on it, of course it wasn’t. He just shrugged and said “it’s probably is the fastest way down, as long as we don’t get hit again, or lose power.” Duh. Well, I got in and we both sweated the full 10 seconds it took to get to the ground floor.
We got out and went out the main lobby door. There was the security guard and two oriental cleaning men. They had been on the 15th floor and had an even more scary experience. They had taken the elevator down too. I asked if there wasn’t an emergency exit plan. “I don’t know.” said the security guard. Great. My knees were still wobbly.
“I think I’ll just take a break now,” I said.
We stood around and listened to the police and fire sirens going off all over town. “I’m from Texas and we don’t have things like that there.” I said. “I’ve been here eight years, and I never felt anything like that before either,” said the guard. It turned out to be a 5.4 earthquake centered about 20 miles north of here, shallow and on a previously unknown fault line. My friend later told me that he had been in a store very near the epicenter, which was in Duvall. He lives up in Snohomish county. Stuff fell off the shelves, tiles fell from the ceiling, the lights went out and stayed out. “People were screaming and crying all over the place.” he said.
The following morning the paper reported it all. There were power outages, mostly in the northern part of the area, but thankfully, no one was hurt — the most serious injury was a broken arm suffered by a woman unfortunate enough to be standing on a ladder when the quake hit.