Earthquake

I’ve been listening lately, still with only one ear, to all the hand-wringing over nuclear reactors here in the United States in the media. Particularly the facility at Indian Point in New York. I also heard Charles Krauthammer, a political commentator I respect tremendously though do not always agree with, flatly state that the Japanese crisis has effectively ended nuclear power in the US. Again, I do not have a firm opinion one way or the other, due mostly to a lack of background knowledge, and I can see and agree with many points on both sides of the issue. Normally, I would feel all this panic over a similar crisis occurring here, especially in New York, is ludicrous and irrational, except for the fact that ...

I LIVED THROUGH AN EARTHQUAKE IN NEW YORK!

If I remember correctly, my wife and I were staying at a bed & breakfast in Hyde Park, New York. It was April 2002, the weekend around the date of our first wedding anniversary. Sometime in the early morning, five or six or so, I stirred in bed and half-heard half-felt a 4-point-something earthquake. The immediate thought that entered my mind was that someone in the room next door was taking a 200-pound hutch filled with china and silverware and dragging it roughly across a hardwood floor. That was the noise I heard. I did not feel anything, though the fact I was in bed no doubt played a part. If I was standing up I probably would have felt a small vibration or sway through the floor. My wife slept through the whole thing.

Now I’m told a 4-point-something earthquake is small beans. Certainly, major orders of magnitude smaller than the quake that caused the tsunami that ravaged Japan two weeks ago. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Richter scale is a logarithmic scale, meaning the difference between two numbers is a factor of 10, not of 1. There are 5 factors of difference between a 4.0 quake and a 9.0 quake, or 10-to-the-5, which translates to a difference in power of 100,000. The decibel scale is similarly logarithmic. To compare my quake to the Japanese quake would be like comparing watching TV in your living room to putting your head three feet away from Pete Townsend’s Marshall cabinets during Live at Leeds.

My point is, earthquakes do happen in New York. Admittedly, it’s a very, very rare occurrence, and when a quake does occur, it’s generally on the small-beans end of the Richter scale. So I can’t in full conscience harrumph all over the libs and environmentalists who are using the Japanese crisis as a lever to shut down nuclear power in the US. The best I can do, should it ever come up in conversation in a room I’m in, is to advise restraint and (yech) moderation.

And if we’re going to completely freeze our nuclear program, I’ll have three words to add: Drill baby drill.