Right at that exact same instant that I said I’d have to write it all out into a book was the exact moment the apprentice class teacher entered the room and naturally wanted to know what everybody had just been talking about. As far as I can recall nobody said anything to her as far as what we had just been talking about and I can’t say for sure if I hushed them up right at that moment or not, because I suppose it’s possible I might have just if nothing else to avoid going there, you know.
There were other great experiences both at my apartment in Hollywood as well as at Arrowhead Water and probably even one or two from all of those apprentice classes that I took while working out in California. One of my favorite ones from L.A. Apprentice Class was the food vendor style truck that would drive up at lunch time and the reason I recall that the best is because even still today I like to sometimes buy the lemon-line flavored Jarritos soda pop in the bottles, often old fashioned glass soda pop style bottles, but occasionally in the 1.5 Litros “Limon” since I had one right next to me as I was proofreading on the night of July 23, 2013 at 9:33pm.
One of my favorite memories from my Hollywood Apartment was at the height of summer where I used to swim in the pool as often as I could and one day this Italian Girl came running out and jumped in the pool swimming with me. She was from Sardinia, Italy, knew very little English, and was in the process of taking classes to learn. Great enough story right there so I’ll leave it at that.
There was another guy who enjoyed climbing on the roof and jumping off the roof into the pool and yet another who hung around sometimes at night and played his guitar out there next to the pool.
There were two guys at Arrowhead Water who were from Paris, France and the one, who I eventually got to work with didn’t speak any English at all. The amazing part was that it worked out ok and then at break I would have Patrick the boss translate everything about how we were doing and like how everything was going, etc. It all turned out well and Patrick translated everything right back for me but basically just that the guy was quite happy with the situation how it was working out well, and that about sums it all up.
Hooking up with the Carpenters Union and attending apprentice classes was not the first thing I did when I arrived in Hollywood, though. Beginning the day I arrived I was doing a lot of searching for apartments, checking out all the different neighborhoods around Hollywood, and driving up and down the coast checking out all of the beaches.
I looked at a lot of apartments and a lot of landlords complained to me that they had whole entire big giant stacks of applications and so I just moved on and kept right on looking.
It was the guy who carried his pet iguana around with him everywhere that turned out to be my ticket to Hollywood and the glam life I had always dreamed of to quote Nicole, the girl from apartment 17 around towards the shallow end of the pool and next door to the apartment managers apartment. Peter Paul was on the other side of the managers apartment and a guy who had actually been in a movie was in the next apartment, although I do not know his name off hand, Lori does, she’s the girl from apartment 23 who ran out screaming, “Earthquake!” in the last chapter.
So the guy who always carried Maestro around, his pet iguana, showed me apartment 22 and said he wanted to put some new carpeting in it and I told him it would be fine like it was. The advantage I got out of that deal was he gave me the apartment on the spot and allowed me to move in immediately! It was unfortunate they would go on to keep my security deposit due to the carpet being worn and dirty, though.
I don’t recall exactly how this all played out but I had to unload stuff from my car that traveled from Wisconsin, move the stuff such as my bicycle that I had already unloaded at my motel and move it up to my apartment which was several blocks east and maybe a couple blocks south and then there was still a lot of stuff like getting the phone and the D.W.P. going. D.W.P. is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and you want both of them, trust me. It was even very late at night when Fred, my D.W.P. guy arrived but he got the power turned on and I was up and running. Oh, never mind the cable, there was like fifty or seventy-five channels on antenna TV, so I just never bothered to even call them and enjoyed all the free TV I could pull in with just my rabbit ears. That included watching a lot of “Wally George” late at night, too!
All of the transmitters and towers for all of the Los Angeles TV and Radio were located on top of 5000 foot Mt. Wilson, also a great place to go and check out a lot of Great FM radio stations up there on “Audio Drive,” too!
All of this was going on to the tune of Ricky Martins “Livin La Vida Loca” which played over and over virtually that whole summer on the cassette player in my car! Oh, yes, and while those old Jack Benny tapes kept right on playing me to sleep every night in my brand new bungalow high in the hills of Hollywood!
Actually before I even got that apartment this next story happened first. The motel I was staying at was over on Sunset near Hollywood High School and I was probably walking back from the 7-11 on LaBrea which happens to be the same 7-11 as I go to when I’m in that apartment because the apartment is just two blocks North of the 7-11, and the motel was just three or so blocks east of that 7-11.
As I was cruising past the corner in front of my motel across from H.H.S., I notice one of those notice things with all those tear strips with the phone numbers on it and it says “Casting.” Wouldn’t you just know right there in the middle of Hollywood sharing a street corner with Hollywood High School would be a newspaper box with a casting notice taped to it! And one with tear strip style phone numbers on it, as well. So I tore one off and called the number and ran right over to the office on Sunset to meet them on like my first full day there in Hollywood.
I hardly no more than got my Polaroid taken and discussed all of my acting experience for a second and I was cast for a commercial shooting up in the Malibu Canyon area at Calimigos Ranch the very next day!
Of course I said I’d take it and that turned out to be one of the greatest jobs of my life!
My first job out in Hollywood was a spectacular one! The commercial starred Steve Garvey and there were probably a hundred of us playing volleyball and just basically hanging out up at the sunny, lush, and very beautiful Calimigos Ranch just outside of beautiful Malibu Canyon, a location where a lot of other great movies and TV shows are shot.
When it came time for lunch the cameras continued to role and we were all told to just smile and look like we were just continuing to have fun like that all day long! Met a lot of great folks there, too, and went on to work with a lot of them on many more things during my days in Hollywood. I also got the names of a lot of great agencies all around town and that was about the first thing I did when I left there that day after the shoot was completed was to start beating the streets of Hollywood to try and figure out what all I would have to do to really make it big!
I still have a picture I took with one of those old fashioned cameras like the kind that used to have 35mm film in them that you would either remove the film and take it to get developed or sometimes just take the whole camera in and get the whole thing developed and just buy another one. A couple of old fashioned photographs we’ll call them of me at the Santa Monica Pier after that shoot wearing the hat they let us keep with the name of the product I won’t repeat here due to not either having the right to say it, or not wanting to say it such as a laxative or feminine product name which maybe it was, I’m kidding.
Another particular time I was at the Third Street Promenade and for whatever reason I practically never do this and still today try hard not to, but I shoved a handful of miscellaneous cash into my pocket like when I got change back from somewhere, when I usually carry just singles like in a money clip style, although I lost the money clip long ago, so anyways I was walking the Third Street Promenade and basically just enjoying all the different styles and types of street performers when a dance troupe sort of act caught my attention so without thinking I grabbed a bill out of that pocket and tossed it in his hat or cup or I don’t even recall what he was using to collect cash with that day, but he reaches right in there immediately as I’m already a few steps away and he announces loudly to the crowd, “Hey, we just got a FIVE DOLLAR TIP, Everybody!!!” Awesome, too! Because it is so rare that I ever have anything but one dollar bills in that pocket and I didn’t really have to think about it too much more than that to figure out who just gave them the five. That troupe was a very good act just the same and well worth it, too! So I never gave it no more thought then that, other than to hope the very best for all of them at everything they do with their great skills!
I was just cruising out to the Santa Monica Pier on yet another occasion, although this would have been on a trip out there in 1997, when it just so happened to be a day when Bay Watch was shooting there! With the lifeguard vehicle, probably the whole entire cast of lifeguards, and whomever circa 1997 and of course now ME! In my Hawaiian shirt just happening past the set and I suppose as a result also appearing in some wild feed as a general atmo/background sort of person!
Might have been just another day and I may have simply just walked on past, gave all the action a glance and kept on my way, except on this particular day I happened to recognize the director from a movie I had worked on back in Chicago!
I smiled and said hi to her and figured that since I now just realized I know the director from having worked with her in Chicago, that I’d stick around there a while and take in a little bit more of what was going on there that day. So, I took a walk all of the way around the set which that day included the East facing part of that restaurant out there and the pier up to Scooby-Doo or about where the Lifeguard Truck was parked. Probably established that like two of the stars were just basically there to exchange some lines and that was probably about it. So I walked back and forth on action past the signs that say they’re shooting and I give them permission to use my likeness or whatever. After doing that a couple times then I was on my way. They may have been there shooting all day or whatever, I’m not sure.
Possibly my final story I have to tell here about the pier is one day I was out there and the waves started coming cross ways towards the shore there at the Santa Monica Beach and right at that moment I looked up and seen a single airliner flying over us from Northeast towards sort of East Southeast and I knew something was up. From having grown up on the lake I already knew those waves were coming from somewhere and didn’t give that much thought to where it just came from or where it was going or what new flight path flew directly over the pier, there.
That was the day there had been a major plane crash Offshore from Port Hueneme and I suppose that other plane had been flying with the crashed plane and was making an immediate turn for the airport to land. I want to say here how sorry I am for all of the people involved in that incident. Here’s hoping you will all be well.
I was also at The Pier one day just sort of looking around at all of the rides, I’ve never actually rode on any of them as of this writing, but enjoy sort of looking and maybe a summeresque kind of pic every so often, when I notice a big giant bolt rattling there loose on a railing on the track of the rollercoaster! It was one of those joints that holds the actual track that the roller coaster cars themselves are whizzing past on, together. The bolt pattern is two bolts at the top on either side of the track and it consists of two flat pieces of steel with four holes in it and two more bolt holes a few inches below the top bolts but there was only one bolt tight at the bottom, the other was unscrewed about at least an inch from being flush and tight. It basically was just hanging there rattling loosely there where them two holes were lined up. I knew it was not an extreme emergency right at that moment, BUT, I also did not want to waste any time. My normal days out there would consist of walking past and ignoring all of the police and security guys everywhere and they even have a police station or had back in those days, right between the parking lot and the carousel. I immediately grabbed the first police or security guy, not sure which and hauled him over there. Then I extended my arm and pointed with my finger as best I could to try and show him. It only took him a moment to see what I was talking about and I just trusted that he would report it to somebody, somewhere and I moved on.
That reminds me of another thing I found in my travels. While one day driving up and sightseeing around San Francisco, I was out visiting the Golden Gate Bridge when, like you probably know I always like to do, I was glancing up and down taking it all in and just generally sort of looking at everything and seeing what I see. I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes when I was all the way out in the middle of the bridge where the lowest point in the two main cables comes close to eye level at the middle point of the bridge. There was at least one clip that was tearing out of the main truss and a great deal of rust at the points where the banding binds on the cable bundle! Not exactly sure if they have done anything to fix it and have exchanged E-Mails with their board who has assured me their maintenance guys will take a look at it, but that has as of this writing been quite some time and I am not sure if they realize the capacity of the Golden Gate Bridge is subject to the integrity of those very cables. Since that day one of my friends from construction work told me that we have to replace our own cables that we use to lift heavy machinery every six years. The best I can calculate is that the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge have NEVER been replaced and must be somewhere in the area of 75 going on 100 years old. There is probably quite a lot of more rust where just what you can see came from.
Also while driving through that general area at around this same time period or perhaps even the same day, I seen San Andreas Lake from the Freeway which I will discuss more about later.
One of my favorite pass times at my apartment in Hollywood was lifting weights, not to mention watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and cleaning, frying, and eating a lot of fresh fish. The three things would often all go good together, too! Fish was real cheep in the fish markets out along the coast and there was a big one up in Panoramic City, too. That was also where I was getting those great watermelons for just two dollars.
So I ate tons of fresh fish and a lot of really fresh and always crisp watermelons and never missed a single episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire! That is until one Sunday evening I turned it on and suddenly realized I didn’t know any of the players. How could that be? I’ve never missed a single episode in my entire life? How did they manage to pick and now have seated there an entirely new cast without my knowledge? So I ate my fresh fish and probably some of those French fries you bake in the oven, lifted some weights and thought about it a while. The only conclusion I could come up with was they had to have played an episode sometime in between the usual Tuesday or Wednesday episode and Sunday Night as I sat there in front of the TV in disbelief. That leaves like a possible Friday or Saturday Night episode that they failed to announce and just like that the excitement of the show was gone forever. I no longer know who any of the players were, where they were from, or how they got picked. I must have also missed any number of those games they have to beat the others at by putting stuff in order chronologically or whatever, as well as one or two whole entire games they would have played on that show as well.
It all just added up to being the end of my days of following that show as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t by no means the end of fish and baked French fries, though, or lifting weights. I continued to lift until I had the forty pound dumbbells totally mastered and could do a fair amount of reps with them in all the popular positions such as clean and jerk, bench pressing, and arm curls.
After I get to the limit with the forty pounders, then I grab the twenty pounders and lift a while longer, take a few minutes break and then do at least one more set. Occasionally I would do three or four sets like that but normally always at least one or two sets. And there are some other lifts I would throw in there on different days, too, as long as I had my fresh fish, French fries, and watermelon it didn’t matter because I’d always be doing some weight lifting there, too, in my Hollywood Apartment.
One day I was running down to the laundry room and decided to take the balcony instead of the stairs past the pool and noticed I could see the Hollywood Sign from the deep end of the pool side of the building.
So, I’m not sure if I immediately ran into the manager or seen him later, but he goes and gets the key to that apartment right there where the window was we were standing in front of and we walk in and sure enough. . . that particular apartment had a pretty good view of the Hollywood Sign right from their living room! It was also empty and very much available for rent right at that moment as we stood there looking out at the Hollywood Sign. So the manager asks me if I wanted it, and gives me a tour of it. Of course it was a two-bedroom so that was just basically pretty much how that story ended right there.
I didn’t have much difficulty getting registered with Central Casting and it wasn’t long before I was going to work on jobs that they had booked me on. Of course how the system worked back in those days was that you call in their hotline daily and wait for a part that you qualify for and then you call in. I’d like to start this part of the story with all the best parts I got through them, but probably my favorite story happened after I’d been out on many jobs for them and one day they needed two or three hundred guys for a town festival on a movie called The Dukes of Hazard. The recording said to call Sasha and say you want to party with the Duke Boys! So you’ll never guess what I quickly did almost instantly and without putting hardly any additional thought into it. Well, there was a long, long pause at the other end of the line and she said hold on. It was a long hold not really knowing if I was on hold or the phone was still up to her ear or what. Then it was over and she said, “No,” and hung up and that was basically how my wonderful career out in Hollywood ended, but I had a lot of other parts in the meantime so now that you know how Hollywood is going to end already, let me tell you about all the other stuff I did work on!
Probably my best and practically my all time favorite TV show job up to then was, “ER.” Not only because I had already worked on it before, which I might have mentioned back in the Chicago part of the book, but because at the time it was like one of the top shows and when you tell people you’re working on “ER,” they instantly know practically everything there was to know about the show and are really into the fact that I’m working on-set as an actor on that show.
The particular episode I worked on starred Alan Alda and was eventually nominated for an Emmy and I picked up a ticket for that Emmy Awards Show and actually went to the show that night.
Another show I worked on was called Get Real and I was on a Rehab Unit with a girl who was in rehab on the show. Might have been just another day of work except that I just happened to look that show up recently due to discovering Barta from 2 and a Half Men was also on there and it occurred to me I should look up the girl I had worked with who played the part of the girl who was in rehab. That made for an interesting search because I found that girl is today Anne Hathaway.
On the TV series NYPD Blue we shot at 20th Century Fox Studios on what they call their “New York Street” in the back lot area and before the day was all over I ended up crossing the street with Denny Franz in one scene. In another scene my car was fixed up with New York license plates and a New York Parking sticker taped onto my windshield which I still have pressed into one of my acting books somewhere. Whichever one I was carrying with me that day.
There was a lot of other acting stuff and that night at the Emmy Awards Show was fun, but eventually it would come time for me to stop by and check out the Los Angeles Carpenters Union. Didn’t have any trouble getting in there either and it wouldn’t be too long before I was out on my first California construction job, too. This was the San Diego Water Treatment Plant located at San Ysidro physically situated on the border with Mexico right along the fence there, with the Mexican Border Patrol watching us all day long with machine guns.
Some of the other jobs I worked on with those guys, some of whom you can read more about in the Arrowhead Water story, were Long Beach, Bakersfield, and South L.A.
The big job outside of Bakersfield is still today one of my all time best Carpenters Union jobs, since it paid Bakersfield scale. The exact location was outside of Taft, which is west of Bakersfield and the home of the biggest oil field in the world. There is also what at one time was the largest gusher of all time in the world, too! That gusher is still eighteen feet across and when it was gushing at its maximum it was two or three hundred feet in the air! And you’ll never guess how long that gusher gushed.
Three years! They did different things during that amount of time to try to capture as much of the oil as they could but it is estimated they only ever caught and recovered about half of it. I believe they built a sort of wall around it to fill up and so they could pump standing crude oil back out of it until eventually one day it must have stopped.
The guys referred to the Midway Sunset Power Plant as the place they remembered for being the hottest during the day and where they eventually also had to put the most clothes back on at night because the high and low temperatures varied so much. I recall it being located practically on top of the San Andreas Fault which is actually located right there I think at the tip of that hill just to the west of the power plant. It was also sort of well known, to me anyways, as the place where on one particular week a Monday just so happened to be a holiday and as a result I received one particular paycheck that had something like a hundred hours of overtime on it. Big check and it was a big job there just outside of Fellows, California where at that time they even still had a store and a post office. I think they are both gone today or were the last time I was up that way.
Before I left Wisconsin, Big Louie Evans mentioned that in his days out in L.A. he worked at a glass plant where the bottles are stamped and then come down a conveyor red hot. It just so happened that I was actually sent to such a plant at one point and today that is the South L.A. job, although it was more towards East L.A., because I used to drive right past the depot that said East Los Angeles every night after work on that job.
I suppose the highlight of that job was the day when we finished up cutting in a length of conveyor right at 4:00pm and Bob the engineer said we could quit and just wait till tomorrow to start it up and do the final alignments to it. Well my answer to that as I told Bubba the boss on that job was that I am getting paid until 4:30pm so I was in favor of starting it up and hitting it with the wrenches and just see if we couldn’t quick align it that easy. It worked and we were out of there on time and Bubba thanked us and the company actually even used that conveyor line right away that night and it’s probably been running ever since.
Then on the last day of that job at about three in the afternoon Bubba came out and asked all of us if we would want to all go with him to the next job in Vacaville, California. Another glass plant I suppose similar to the one we just finished up that day. For me, due to it being a Saturday I would not be able to give him an answer because I would need to call the hall on Monday morning and see if I could just go work in the San Francisco local like that. Bubba just said to forget it, then, and I never seen him again. I sure wanted that job bad, though and still wish today there was some way me and Bubba could have got together and made some kind of arrangement with either the L.A. local or the S. F. local, it’s just that it was Saturday and most unfortunate that nobody knew.
Long Beach was the ARCO Refinery and is most famous for being the job where the Goodyear Blimp was flying over us once or twice. It is also situated directly under the Vincent Thomas Bridge right at the entrance to like the L.A. Harbor or whatever harbor that is there because I do not know for sure.
We did our work at a generator there and basically were only there to replace one very large bearing that apparently had been making some noise or something. The job at Long Beach was actually only like two days which reminds me of one other job.
The Sony Plant in San Diego ran four days and all of the sudden the boss there decided he needed a couple of us to work one more day. When we work five days the rule is we would normally automatically go to the bottom of the “Out of Work List,” but the boss promised me he wouldn’t put me at the bottom of the list and so I agreed to one additional day.
He meant well, but when I called in on the following Monday guess what happened. I can tell you today it was to be only temporary, but I did find my name at the bottom of the out of work list briefly on Monday morning. Trouble with that was not getting my spot at the top back. . . . . the real trouble with it was that there were 860 people on that out of work list and you might as well say I was number 861.
So, I got my number moved back up in the hundreds somewhere BUT unfortunately I discovered in the process that L.A. just so happened to have almost a thousand guys on the out of work list.
I was camping out at Capistrano Beach or should I just say Laguna Beach, shortly after that incident when the ground really started to shake a lot and I found myself at the epicenter of a huge earthquake. I held on for dear life and could hear rocks falling from the nearby cliffs where nice houses stood at the top. It went on quite long and I ran to the car, opened the door and sat down in the drivers seat and watched nearby trees swaying and continued to hear rocks falling from the cliff and could see cars on the Pacific Coast Highway now having to dodge rocks falling into the road there.
Today I call that the moment I decided to pull-up stakes and head back to Wisconsin. I had been planning on getting back home at some point anyways and had deliberately saved a lot of my best work for the libraries back home due to knowing my way around there so much better. I knew research was something I would have to do back home and that was when I decided it was what I would do next. So it was time I now began on the Wisconsin part of my work towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Chapter 6--The “Digital EQ Alert” Age!!!
The very first time I’d ever actually surfed the web was all the way back in the year 1993 when I discovered there was starting to be some talk on the subject and it had gone so far as one of the local TV stations now having a website. I began to keep a list of all the things and places that I had heard about on the internet and one day I waltzed into one of my local libraries with the list and asked if I could use that one single computer parked all the way over in the far corner of the Reference Department that had been set aside as an internet computer.
It wasn’t any more difficult than your basic card catalogs that had already gone to computers at some of the libraries just a few years earlier. There were a lot of years that followed where I would be able to access the internet from time to time through a lot of different access points. In Los Angeles there were also libraries that had computers set aside for internet use and an occasional motel would have an internet terminal in the lobby that would usually just be sitting there lonely until I came along and would make use of it. Don’t get me wrong there was like at least one other person from all throughout time that also has used one of those computer terminals at random motels you know. Then truck stops started to have them here and there and before long I was able to virtually always keep up with the weather no matter where I was going as well as the latest earthquakes, too! These were the very early years of Social Networking or Social Media as I’ve also heard it called. Although not exactly yet up to the point where I had come across any actual Social Networks.
I did happen to start to find that more and more of my friends were gaining an interest in the internet and I was about to start learning some of my best stuff from them.
I think it was probably one of my neighbors up in Hollywood who was the very first person I remember sitting and staring at a computer for a lot of hours. Whether it had anything to do with it or not, he also worked for one of the today huge outfits that I’m sorry I will be unable to give any details about, but it was to get even more huge in the years after I left Hollywood and I’m sure he was probably a part of that growth, too! Not giving any names to sweeten this story here, sorry.
I must have had some contact with E-Mail all the way back in the days of apprentice school because one of my friends from L.A. apprentice class had “Web-TV” and gave me his Web-TV E-Mail address and it resulted in never actually loosing track of him. Even sent him one or two good “EQ Alerts” for L.A. in the days since we were in the classroom during that great “L.A. Apprentice Class Prediction.”
After I was back home and had pulled up stakes and was all done working and living in California, one of my friends back home had picked up a computer somewhere along the way and this was about to further my knowledge even more! First, one of the other guys I know was sending messages recorded via “Sound Recorder” and I still even have one of those saved somewhere today. That so far has turned out NOT to be a trend like I thought at the time it might. Neither was sending E-Mail messages in every type and style of fonts that you could find on there, either, or colors for that matter, assuming by now everybody has figured that part all out and has by now sent and probably received a few of those themselves. So, I finally had my own E-Mail address but it would be quite a while yet before I would be putting it to use sending out any “EQ Alerts” via E-Mail.
There were probably a lot of “EQ Alerts” that had gone out before I learned how to save copies for myself. The very first one that ended up actually preceding a Major Earthquake was probably the one I sent out prior to the Paso Robles Earthquake in December of 2003. All of the actual details on that one are discussed somewhere else in this book already so I won‘t explain all of that again here. Here I just want to say that if there were any E-Mails, or EQ Alerts sent out to anybody, before December 2003, I do not personally have any copies and up to this point have not located any of them anywhere. From memory it seems like there was a big North Dakota earthquake that was preceded by a hurricane that made landfall in the Gulf of Baja California that did have an E-Mail or two that I sent out, but I don’t know of any copies that exist.
That was early 2002 and it is possible that I had sent something even earlier than that like to a place called “Seismo” in Reno that I used to follow a long time ago but haven’t heard anything from in a long time.
It was also around that time that I just so happened to attend an auction where there were a lot of old laptops being auctioned off.
Today this is the place where I got my first laptop on which I would later write the First Edition of my book How To Predict Earthquakes. Learning how to use WordPad was hard enough back in them days but it was all I needed to do what I basically just wanted to do with that laptop.
This was all happening at around the same time in the year 2003 also, because both the very first EQ Alert--E-Mail that I have copies of actually SAVED and the very first edition of my book were BOTH from December of 2003. Therefore the version of the E-Mail not saved would have been from January 2003.
The December 2003 “EQ Alert” still only exists in the printed out format, and the other one that still exists only in printed out format is the September 2004 “EQ Alert: California.” So it was only at some point in time between “EQ Alert: California” and “Big EQ Alert” for Indonesia that preceded the Sumatra 2004 Earthquake that I learned how to actually SAVE myself a copy of those “EQ Alerts” as I was sending them out. Which makes sense because it was why I was also learning how to write my first book on WordPad at the same time. My method even still today consists of sending myself a copy and then saving my copy in my Earthquake Stuff files and then, at a later date, saving all of that to a travel drive. However anymore I am producing far more writing right at my EQ Blog and worry very little about saving any copies for myself.
I think without going into it any further that for whatever reason that December 2003 one IS a saved version, but I know for sure September 2004 is not. Although it may only have been saved in PDF version later not to confuse the reader of course. I can not say for sure why 2003 is and 2004 isn’t. It would make more sense the other way around, you know. For sure, though, “Big EQ Alert” IS saved still to this day there are still copies of that one floating around here everywhere. I probably went through a one year period of not saving everything I sent or perhaps not yet deciding if I should save everything and as a result not saving a lot of them. Ironic that period was followed by a very long period in which I saved everything I sent out and then again followed by right now when I post quite a lot of it right to my EQ Blog and don’t have any copies of a lot of those for myself as I am writing this here today on June 30, 2013.
I’m sure there’s a lot more stuff about the internet and E-Mail in general that I could write but the next thing I want to discuss is all of the different “Web-Logs” that started to pop up everywhere. It wasn’t too long before the words “Web-Log” were just shortened down into the word Blog and not too long after that before just about everybody who was anybody had one.
I started right away spending some time checking out different blogs to see what different people were writing about and trying to figure out how I might write one. Some of the first blogs that I would read on a regular basis were written by the guys who actually run the blogs such as Tom at MySpace writing about what all was going on back in them days as far as new apps and everything, obviously a long time ago because today you don’t hear of MySpace too much. That also became one of my first attempts at Social Networking for the purposes of my work with earthquakes.
I think Mary Kate and Ashley was one of the very first blogs on the internet, not that I was a regular reader there or anything like that, though, I’m thinking they blogged about fashion and were just introducing a new line of clothes or something like that. Some other blogs I enjoyed reading when I was just starting out include ones that were quite a lot more political and I don’t happen to have any of their names handy, except to add that it was so long ago we still called them journals.
I just noticed the other day that my old MySpace EQ Blog is on there again after being missing for quite some time. It was during those days when MySpace was changing a lot and maybe I just lost track of where the button was for blog, not sure, I just know I hadn’t seen it in quite some time.
We are up to the point where I decided I should have a MySpace for my earthquake work and so I started a MySpace under the name “Earthquake Alert” all one word or whatever, and maybe with EQ Guy for my name on there somewhere, not sure. I do know there’s the pic of the globe that sort of represents me, though.
I started to have a lot of friends on MySpace, of course that was still back in the days when you could just add people and suddenly have hundreds of friends. They don’t let you do that anymore and on Facebook they won’t even let me add Palos Verde because I “Don’t personally know Palos Verde.” So I only have to this day something like two hundred friends on Facebook.
I wrote my MySpace EQ Blog whenever there was an earthquake to write about and once or twice sent ones that were just a little more important out via message to folks that were in the areas I was most concerned about, usually mostly L.A., or S.F., but I suppose occasionally Seattle, too, since on MySpace I had friends in all of those places.
I suppose MySpace was probably like the renaissance of social networking back in those days and I don’t recall if I had my own personal MySpace right from the start, or if I started out on there as EQ Guy. Most likely the procedure I was using was to try it out under my own name and fully learn how to use it and really make it work, then when I thought I knew enough about how it all worked and could get one going especially for earthquakes, then I would do just that.
That would most likely have been the beginnings of what you should still be able to view on there today at www.myspace.com/earthquakealert
Then, there was the one about the earthquake that was headed directly for San Francisco and while I probably might have written on my MySpace EQ Blog at the time, but I do believe I used the “Bulletin” feature for this purpose back in those days. It was the fact that I thought this one important enough that I should also be sending it out by direct message to all my folks right in the San Francisco area that makes this story so important, though.
When a 4.2 Richters Earthquake struck just a mile or so from Oakland, California back in July of 2007, I received back two letters from a couple of my friends out in San Francisco who both wanted to personally thank me for letting them know ahead of time that there was going to be an earthquake. One of them also said she would tell all her friends!
At some point I had eventually decided that I might also need to give You Tube a try and I took about the next big EQ Alert that came along and made it into a “Digital EQ Alert” and posted it to my new Earthquake You Tube! Now there have been several of these “Digital EQ Alerts” produced and posted on there since the days when I first started on there, as well as a few songs about earthquakes that I’ve written and one or two other great earthquake related videos I’ve made along the way. In my favorites section you can see a lot of videos of earthquakes in action! Many of those ones where the cam caught all the walls and windows starting to shake along with all of the people running out of buildings! My Earthquake You Tube page is at www.youtube.com/earthquakealert
Eventually I decided it was time for me to try out one of those actual Blog things since that was not exactly up to that point what I had been doing. I was never real sure if the sort of work I did could be that well adapted to the art of Blog writing and as a result, I was never sure if I wanted to jump into it. The one I had that was associated with my EQ MySpace probably worked fine as far as just mostly my friends on MySpace were concerned, but I was never sure if it constituted having a real blog per se.
Somewhere along the way I ran into a couple real nice blogs that were hosted by blogspot or blogger and that would end up being the one that I ultimately decided to go with and still use today at least as of this writing.
Unless this company decides to change how they operate like a lot of the other companies seem to like to do all of the time, then this blog should continue to work well for me long into the future. It also has the ability to click on any year and find virtually any of my EQ Blogs from the past by year and month and in a lot of cases you can even search by the banner headline through virtually all of my past EQ Blogs. I can change the colors, fonts, links, post pics, embedded vids, and you name it. Hope they’ll leave it alone, it works quite well just like it is today, and has everything. The address for that EQ Blog is www.earthquakealert.blogspot.com and that blog is probably one of the biggest things of all at helping me in my effort towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
There was a period of time when I might have ran both the MySpace EQ Blog and the Blogspot EQ Blog all at the same time and this was about at the same time as Twitter came along.
For a while I was never sure if Twitter should be sort of a blog itself or exactly what I should do with the 120 characters that you use on that service to “Tweet.” What became clear to me first off was that I now had the opportunity to “Follow” quite a lot of other folks with this new Twitter service and keep up on what all was happening say at the Los Angeles Zoo, or the Chicago Sun-Times, as well. Following a lot of different West Coast people on Twitter allows me to keep up-to-date the moment an earthquake strikes just about anywhere out there due to Twitter having lists. Wherever the earthquake struck, Northern or Southern California, L.A., or San Francisco. . . I can simply click on that list and quickly read to find out how everybody’s doing in that part of the state as well as several other places around the world where I have followers or vice-versa. It was immediately a new deal all together as far as being the new source for a lot of this real great information. Although it took me quite some time to be a good writer inside of their 120 character format, you know.
It wouldn’t be too long before I figured out how to “follow” a few of the various USGS Twitters and a few others who also Tweeted the latest earthquake information and figured out how to have specifically those tweets sent directly to my cell phone by way of the “Short Message Service” or SMS. It wouldn’t be too long before my phone was ringing quite regularly, or chiming after I learned to adjust that too, and I would now have every single earthquake being sent directly to my cell phone via text message almost the exact instant they happen. By only now following the services that send me the biggest earthquakes, I no longer receive up to 50 text messages a day like I did for a while there. Although I must say it did cost me a little bit of money to learn that.
Somewhere along the way my tweets on my EQ Twitter page at www.twitter.com/eqalert became primarily tweets that were similar to the headline of a recent EQ Blog and then a link to my EQ Blog, although I can also use it for minute by minute tweets of different events such as re-tweeting aftershocks of a Major Earthquake or some Lakers and Kings games.
After operating my EQ Blog and EQ Twitter in parallel for quite some time, I discovered sort of a bug in this system the way I was running it at the time. Later EQ Blog entries were starting to appear at the top if you were to click on a link in an older tweet. Somehow I discovered in my travels that there was such a thing as clicking on the headline for a specific EQ Blog entry and then cutting and pasting just that blog entry to my Twitter page and thus, hopefully, creating a more or less permanent link to the exact EQ Blog entry that the tweet was referring to on the date it was posted.
As of this writing today I have now been using Twitter since about the year 2009 and my EQ Blog has now branched out into EQ Blog-2, and EQ Blog-3 as well as a blog for my work as Quake Chaser, and one I just started a week or so ago I call “Earthquake Central.” I have recently started using the new Earthquake Central EQ Blog to post some of those really long lists of all the earthquakes contained in a swarm for folks who like to see the whole entire list of like a hundred earthquakes that struck one single location over a number of hours. I had also given some thought to using it as a Blog where I post write-ups of just earthquake events that happen like on a day-to-day basis.
Finally in the mainstream forward movement of Facebook, I eventually checked it out and have a page on there titled EQ Guy, but they don’t do business like the other social networks have over the years so I actually do very little on there other than to have a couple friends that moved to there from MySpace. I will occasionally cut and paste a recent EQ Tweet to my EQ Facebook, but as anybody who uses it knows. . . . . it will be subject to the whim of somebody, somewhere as to if anybody will ever see it, or not.
It occurred to me more than once along the way that the science of Earthquake Prediction was starting to look more and more like it was going to surely come riding in on the current wave of social networking or social media as they’re also calling it now, and so far it appears to be happening. You may agree that it is now kind of ironic that some of my best advances have been made courtesy of all the stuff available on the internet such as sources of information about practically every single earthquake throughout history versus that day in 1994 when I was just starting out my research when quite a lot of it still came from old “Brick and Mortar” encyclopedias, and microfilm.
Today I can make even those quickest of five minute searches now in seconds I can get the exact magnitude, date, time, everything on most all major earthquakes through history. Then came all the lists of recent earthquakes that are available and I can honestly add that from time to time I will occasionally even be able to say an earthquake might strike here due to the fact that I see on this list of current earthquakes that recent one have struck here and here. Kind of a science of “Precision Plate Tectonics” as I like to call it and one I find myself using more and more often as of today July 1, 2013.
That is also the date when I just this morning walked out to the mailbox and received my very first check from that EQ Blog. It has taken me several years to accrue the amount they require your account to build up to before they pay-out, but it was just last month when I had a good month of like four or five dollars and went over that magic number and got that first check in the mail today courtesy of all the work I’ve done with earthquakes up to this point, for $104! Thank-You to everybody who has checked out that EQ Blog over the years, too, and made that possible!!! You are a very important part of my work towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
It wasn’t any more difficult than your basic card catalogs that had already gone to computers at some of the libraries just a few years earlier. There were a lot of years that followed where I would be able to access the internet from time to time through a lot of different access points. In Los Angeles there were also libraries that had computers set aside for internet use and an occasional motel would have an internet terminal in the lobby that would usually just be sitting there lonely until I came along and would make use of it. Don’t get me wrong there was like at least one other person from all throughout time that also has used one of those computer terminals at random motels you know. Then truck stops started to have them here and there and before long I was able to virtually always keep up with the weather no matter where I was going as well as the latest earthquakes, too! These were the very early years of Social Networking or Social Media as I’ve also heard it called. Although not exactly yet up to the point where I had come across any actual Social Networks.
I did happen to start to find that more and more of my friends were gaining an interest in the internet and I was about to start learning some of my best stuff from them.
I think it was probably one of my neighbors up in Hollywood who was the very first person I remember sitting and staring at a computer for a lot of hours. Whether it had anything to do with it or not, he also worked for one of the today huge outfits that I’m sorry I will be unable to give any details about, but it was to get even more huge in the years after I left Hollywood and I’m sure he was probably a part of that growth, too! Not giving any names to sweeten this story here, sorry.
I must have had some contact with E-Mail all the way back in the days of apprentice school because one of my friends from L.A. apprentice class had “Web-TV” and gave me his Web-TV E-Mail address and it resulted in never actually loosing track of him. Even sent him one or two good “EQ Alerts” for L.A. in the days since we were in the classroom during that great “L.A. Apprentice Class Prediction.”
After I was back home and had pulled up stakes and was all done working and living in California, one of my friends back home had picked up a computer somewhere along the way and this was about to further my knowledge even more! First, one of the other guys I know was sending messages recorded via “Sound Recorder” and I still even have one of those saved somewhere today. That so far has turned out NOT to be a trend like I thought at the time it might. Neither was sending E-Mail messages in every type and style of fonts that you could find on there, either, or colors for that matter, assuming by now everybody has figured that part all out and has by now sent and probably received a few of those themselves. So, I finally had my own E-Mail address but it would be quite a while yet before I would be putting it to use sending out any “EQ Alerts” via E-Mail.
There were probably a lot of “EQ Alerts” that had gone out before I learned how to save copies for myself. The very first one that ended up actually preceding a Major Earthquake was probably the one I sent out prior to the Paso Robles Earthquake in December of 2003. All of the actual details on that one are discussed somewhere else in this book already so I won‘t explain all of that again here. Here I just want to say that if there were any E-Mails, or EQ Alerts sent out to anybody, before December 2003, I do not personally have any copies and up to this point have not located any of them anywhere. From memory it seems like there was a big North Dakota earthquake that was preceded by a hurricane that made landfall in the Gulf of Baja California that did have an E-Mail or two that I sent out, but I don’t know of any copies that exist.
That was early 2002 and it is possible that I had sent something even earlier than that like to a place called “Seismo” in Reno that I used to follow a long time ago but haven’t heard anything from in a long time.
It was also around that time that I just so happened to attend an auction where there were a lot of old laptops being auctioned off.
Today this is the place where I got my first laptop on which I would later write the First Edition of my book How To Predict Earthquakes. Learning how to use WordPad was hard enough back in them days but it was all I needed to do what I basically just wanted to do with that laptop.
This was all happening at around the same time in the year 2003 also, because both the very first EQ Alert--E-Mail that I have copies of actually SAVED and the very first edition of my book were BOTH from December of 2003. Therefore the version of the E-Mail not saved would have been from January 2003.
The December 2003 “EQ Alert” still only exists in the printed out format, and the other one that still exists only in printed out format is the September 2004 “EQ Alert: California.” So it was only at some point in time between “EQ Alert: California” and “Big EQ Alert” for Indonesia that preceded the Sumatra 2004 Earthquake that I learned how to actually SAVE myself a copy of those “EQ Alerts” as I was sending them out. Which makes sense because it was why I was also learning how to write my first book on WordPad at the same time. My method even still today consists of sending myself a copy and then saving my copy in my Earthquake Stuff files and then, at a later date, saving all of that to a travel drive. However anymore I am producing far more writing right at my EQ Blog and worry very little about saving any copies for myself.
I think without going into it any further that for whatever reason that December 2003 one IS a saved version, but I know for sure September 2004 is not. Although it may only have been saved in PDF version later not to confuse the reader of course. I can not say for sure why 2003 is and 2004 isn’t. It would make more sense the other way around, you know. For sure, though, “Big EQ Alert” IS saved still to this day there are still copies of that one floating around here everywhere. I probably went through a one year period of not saving everything I sent or perhaps not yet deciding if I should save everything and as a result not saving a lot of them. Ironic that period was followed by a very long period in which I saved everything I sent out and then again followed by right now when I post quite a lot of it right to my EQ Blog and don’t have any copies of a lot of those for myself as I am writing this here today on June 30, 2013.
I’m sure there’s a lot more stuff about the internet and E-Mail in general that I could write but the next thing I want to discuss is all of the different “Web-Logs” that started to pop up everywhere. It wasn’t too long before the words “Web-Log” were just shortened down into the word Blog and not too long after that before just about everybody who was anybody had one.
I started right away spending some time checking out different blogs to see what different people were writing about and trying to figure out how I might write one. Some of the first blogs that I would read on a regular basis were written by the guys who actually run the blogs such as Tom at MySpace writing about what all was going on back in them days as far as new apps and everything, obviously a long time ago because today you don’t hear of MySpace too much. That also became one of my first attempts at Social Networking for the purposes of my work with earthquakes.
I think Mary Kate and Ashley was one of the very first blogs on the internet, not that I was a regular reader there or anything like that, though, I’m thinking they blogged about fashion and were just introducing a new line of clothes or something like that. Some other blogs I enjoyed reading when I was just starting out include ones that were quite a lot more political and I don’t happen to have any of their names handy, except to add that it was so long ago we still called them journals.
I just noticed the other day that my old MySpace EQ Blog is on there again after being missing for quite some time. It was during those days when MySpace was changing a lot and maybe I just lost track of where the button was for blog, not sure, I just know I hadn’t seen it in quite some time.
We are up to the point where I decided I should have a MySpace for my earthquake work and so I started a MySpace under the name “Earthquake Alert” all one word or whatever, and maybe with EQ Guy for my name on there somewhere, not sure. I do know there’s the pic of the globe that sort of represents me, though.
I started to have a lot of friends on MySpace, of course that was still back in the days when you could just add people and suddenly have hundreds of friends. They don’t let you do that anymore and on Facebook they won’t even let me add Palos Verde because I “Don’t personally know Palos Verde.” So I only have to this day something like two hundred friends on Facebook.
I wrote my MySpace EQ Blog whenever there was an earthquake to write about and once or twice sent ones that were just a little more important out via message to folks that were in the areas I was most concerned about, usually mostly L.A., or S.F., but I suppose occasionally Seattle, too, since on MySpace I had friends in all of those places.
I suppose MySpace was probably like the renaissance of social networking back in those days and I don’t recall if I had my own personal MySpace right from the start, or if I started out on there as EQ Guy. Most likely the procedure I was using was to try it out under my own name and fully learn how to use it and really make it work, then when I thought I knew enough about how it all worked and could get one going especially for earthquakes, then I would do just that.
That would most likely have been the beginnings of what you should still be able to view on there today at www.myspace.com/earthquakealert
Then, there was the one about the earthquake that was headed directly for San Francisco and while I probably might have written on my MySpace EQ Blog at the time, but I do believe I used the “Bulletin” feature for this purpose back in those days. It was the fact that I thought this one important enough that I should also be sending it out by direct message to all my folks right in the San Francisco area that makes this story so important, though.
When a 4.2 Richters Earthquake struck just a mile or so from Oakland, California back in July of 2007, I received back two letters from a couple of my friends out in San Francisco who both wanted to personally thank me for letting them know ahead of time that there was going to be an earthquake. One of them also said she would tell all her friends!
At some point I had eventually decided that I might also need to give You Tube a try and I took about the next big EQ Alert that came along and made it into a “Digital EQ Alert” and posted it to my new Earthquake You Tube! Now there have been several of these “Digital EQ Alerts” produced and posted on there since the days when I first started on there, as well as a few songs about earthquakes that I’ve written and one or two other great earthquake related videos I’ve made along the way. In my favorites section you can see a lot of videos of earthquakes in action! Many of those ones where the cam caught all the walls and windows starting to shake along with all of the people running out of buildings! My Earthquake You Tube page is at www.youtube.com/earthquakealert
Eventually I decided it was time for me to try out one of those actual Blog things since that was not exactly up to that point what I had been doing. I was never real sure if the sort of work I did could be that well adapted to the art of Blog writing and as a result, I was never sure if I wanted to jump into it. The one I had that was associated with my EQ MySpace probably worked fine as far as just mostly my friends on MySpace were concerned, but I was never sure if it constituted having a real blog per se.
Somewhere along the way I ran into a couple real nice blogs that were hosted by blogspot or blogger and that would end up being the one that I ultimately decided to go with and still use today at least as of this writing.
Unless this company decides to change how they operate like a lot of the other companies seem to like to do all of the time, then this blog should continue to work well for me long into the future. It also has the ability to click on any year and find virtually any of my EQ Blogs from the past by year and month and in a lot of cases you can even search by the banner headline through virtually all of my past EQ Blogs. I can change the colors, fonts, links, post pics, embedded vids, and you name it. Hope they’ll leave it alone, it works quite well just like it is today, and has everything. The address for that EQ Blog is www.earthquakealert.blogspot.com and that blog is probably one of the biggest things of all at helping me in my effort towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
There was a period of time when I might have ran both the MySpace EQ Blog and the Blogspot EQ Blog all at the same time and this was about at the same time as Twitter came along.
For a while I was never sure if Twitter should be sort of a blog itself or exactly what I should do with the 120 characters that you use on that service to “Tweet.” What became clear to me first off was that I now had the opportunity to “Follow” quite a lot of other folks with this new Twitter service and keep up on what all was happening say at the Los Angeles Zoo, or the Chicago Sun-Times, as well. Following a lot of different West Coast people on Twitter allows me to keep up-to-date the moment an earthquake strikes just about anywhere out there due to Twitter having lists. Wherever the earthquake struck, Northern or Southern California, L.A., or San Francisco. . . I can simply click on that list and quickly read to find out how everybody’s doing in that part of the state as well as several other places around the world where I have followers or vice-versa. It was immediately a new deal all together as far as being the new source for a lot of this real great information. Although it took me quite some time to be a good writer inside of their 120 character format, you know.
It wouldn’t be too long before I figured out how to “follow” a few of the various USGS Twitters and a few others who also Tweeted the latest earthquake information and figured out how to have specifically those tweets sent directly to my cell phone by way of the “Short Message Service” or SMS. It wouldn’t be too long before my phone was ringing quite regularly, or chiming after I learned to adjust that too, and I would now have every single earthquake being sent directly to my cell phone via text message almost the exact instant they happen. By only now following the services that send me the biggest earthquakes, I no longer receive up to 50 text messages a day like I did for a while there. Although I must say it did cost me a little bit of money to learn that.
Somewhere along the way my tweets on my EQ Twitter page at www.twitter.com/eqalert became primarily tweets that were similar to the headline of a recent EQ Blog and then a link to my EQ Blog, although I can also use it for minute by minute tweets of different events such as re-tweeting aftershocks of a Major Earthquake or some Lakers and Kings games.
After operating my EQ Blog and EQ Twitter in parallel for quite some time, I discovered sort of a bug in this system the way I was running it at the time. Later EQ Blog entries were starting to appear at the top if you were to click on a link in an older tweet. Somehow I discovered in my travels that there was such a thing as clicking on the headline for a specific EQ Blog entry and then cutting and pasting just that blog entry to my Twitter page and thus, hopefully, creating a more or less permanent link to the exact EQ Blog entry that the tweet was referring to on the date it was posted.
As of this writing today I have now been using Twitter since about the year 2009 and my EQ Blog has now branched out into EQ Blog-2, and EQ Blog-3 as well as a blog for my work as Quake Chaser, and one I just started a week or so ago I call “Earthquake Central.” I have recently started using the new Earthquake Central EQ Blog to post some of those really long lists of all the earthquakes contained in a swarm for folks who like to see the whole entire list of like a hundred earthquakes that struck one single location over a number of hours. I had also given some thought to using it as a Blog where I post write-ups of just earthquake events that happen like on a day-to-day basis.
Finally in the mainstream forward movement of Facebook, I eventually checked it out and have a page on there titled EQ Guy, but they don’t do business like the other social networks have over the years so I actually do very little on there other than to have a couple friends that moved to there from MySpace. I will occasionally cut and paste a recent EQ Tweet to my EQ Facebook, but as anybody who uses it knows. . . . . it will be subject to the whim of somebody, somewhere as to if anybody will ever see it, or not.
It occurred to me more than once along the way that the science of Earthquake Prediction was starting to look more and more like it was going to surely come riding in on the current wave of social networking or social media as they’re also calling it now, and so far it appears to be happening. You may agree that it is now kind of ironic that some of my best advances have been made courtesy of all the stuff available on the internet such as sources of information about practically every single earthquake throughout history versus that day in 1994 when I was just starting out my research when quite a lot of it still came from old “Brick and Mortar” encyclopedias, and microfilm.
Today I can make even those quickest of five minute searches now in seconds I can get the exact magnitude, date, time, everything on most all major earthquakes through history. Then came all the lists of recent earthquakes that are available and I can honestly add that from time to time I will occasionally even be able to say an earthquake might strike here due to the fact that I see on this list of current earthquakes that recent one have struck here and here. Kind of a science of “Precision Plate Tectonics” as I like to call it and one I find myself using more and more often as of today July 1, 2013.
That is also the date when I just this morning walked out to the mailbox and received my very first check from that EQ Blog. It has taken me several years to accrue the amount they require your account to build up to before they pay-out, but it was just last month when I had a good month of like four or five dollars and went over that magic number and got that first check in the mail today courtesy of all the work I’ve done with earthquakes up to this point, for $104! Thank-You to everybody who has checked out that EQ Blog over the years, too, and made that possible!!! You are a very important part of my work towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
Chapter 7--Tracking Earthquake Energy
It kind of reminds me of when I took acting school down in Chicago and drove down there every Tuesday or Wednesday for a lot of weeks and paid a certain amount of money for those classes, all the while waiting and wondering if I would ever get enough acting jobs to pay back all the money I had into those classes. Originally my work with earthquakes made me feel that way, too. I knew I was starting to put a lot of my time into it and was also giving up a lot of my script writing that was supposed to be eventually making money, too, however I never would have guessed back in the hours and days following the Northridge Earthquake that the first check I would earn from all my work with earthquakes would be one for writing an EQ Blog on the internet!
As I write this today I still have that check right here and have not cashed it! I took some pictures of me with it yesterday and want to get a scan of it, yet if everybody thinks that would be ok. All along the way up to this point it has been my opinion that there might not be a way to ever make back any of the money I’d been putting into this project due to thinking along the lines of wanting to get the word out to as many people as possible and therefore such concepts as charging for the information were never an option for me. Granted there are outfits who do ask you for a fee in order to access their information or to receive their E-Mail, newsletter, or whatever with their latest earthquake information. Having spent a considerable amount of time contemplating the ethics involved with their methods, I decided quite early in my mission that it seemed I would probably NOT EVER be able to incorporate any money making angles into my work with earthquakes at all whatsoever. Reason being that all my efforts to get all of this key information out to the people in all of the affected areas who really need it the most, should probably not ever be slowed down, impaired, or hindered in any way especially so that a guy can be turning a dollar on the whole deal.
A fine example of that is the fact that I paid ninety-nine cents for the globe that I use to track earthquake energy all around the world and now having made my first income from all of that work, you could also say I more than paid for that globe!
Now on to the main subject of this chapter, and that is the business of how I track earthquakes. The globe is among the newest tools that I decided to employ along the way and the straight line tool that I use to make a straight line all the way around it is even newer. Maps are useful because you can follow a lot of the smaller lines directly to Major Earthquakes such as the line West from the landfall of Hurricane Hugo at Charleston, South Carolina in 1989 directly to the epicenter of the World Series Earthquake. I still have the map today where I originally tracked that event right after I had discovered the correlation and decided to check that one out to see for sure. That was actually the day in history when although I already probably knew there WAS a correlation. . . I did not know that it was straight line energy. I recall looking and all of the sudden just realizing that if you draw a line over the Alleghenies, across the plains of the Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains, and Sierra Mountains, you actually come right out at San Francisco!
Knowing that this kind of a hypothesis just might have some basis in reality, I looked very closely at Charleston and carefully placed a straight edge on what I thought the exact point of landfall might have been that day with the leading edge of the straight line now laying directly over the top of Northern California!
My words right at that moment were, “This can’t be true! It can not be this easy in the future to predict a Major Earthquake by using something so simple and basic as a straight line tool.” I was very familiar with the fact that Newton said something about energy traveling in a straight line, but I did not have any idea what kind of energy we were talking about right at that moment while all of this was happening on the map right in front of me. All in just the couple of moments that I looked down at whatever I was using for a straight line tool that day, laying across the map such as those I continue to use today for basically the same purpose. I seem to remember using a T-Square that day. Only difference being that it is now days for the purpose of trying to predict where the next Major Earthquake might strike. I can’t say for sure if it actually occurred to me right that moment that I would be using this system in reverse some day to track potential earthquake energy. That would be drawing a straight line from a hurricane that has just made landfall to the nearest major fault line for the purpose of then trying to guess where an earthquake might strike. Although it was still sort of early in the day when I made this discovery. . . by the end of that day I was sure to be Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
The concept of using the globe if I have not discussed it earlier, I originally discovered one day while I was visiting at UW Wisconsin Geology where they have a huge globe in the lobby out front of their Geology Museum. One day I was happening through there, and I know I discuss those visits elsewhere, and I ran into the big giant globe there. I couldn’t believe how all the continents looked so much different on this big globe! Next, I glanced up at the region where a hurricane had just made landfall around Florida bearing west, or southwest and following what I knew at the time to be the exact straight line I can clearly recall coming out somewhere around Guatemala or Guatemala City. This struck me as even a rather curious finding at the time possibly due to my not knowing much about the exact geography of the Gulf of Mexico and Central America. Probably thinking or mumbling to myself something like, “That line can’t possibly come out all the way down there in Guatemala or Guatemala City,” or wherever it came out on that day. The real great kicker in this whole story came when just a few days later whatever point on that globe I managed to track to using that ever so straight line and even just eyeballing it at that, brought me out somewhere down in Central America, BUT at the EXACT POINT where the epicenter of a Major Earthquake struck almost immediately!!! WHEN I saw the name of that city, whatever one it actually was because I do not recall for sure, I was astounded! I looked, looked, and looked at the map showing the epicenter and asked myself HOW did I manage to come up with the name of that city? Then it occurred to me it was the name I came up with when I followed the line with the use of that big giant globe up there in front of the Geology Museum at the University of Wisconsin, Madison!
It was very nearly impossible to believe that going from all of those maps that I have been using up to that point in time, that simply trying out the use of the globe in the Geology Museum could make that much difference. . . it did, though! It appeared right at that moment that the use of the globe gave me the ability to accurately track potential seismic energy everywhere around the world, I just had yet to actually prove it somehow.
I made a number of trips to check something out on that big giant globe which has actual raised surfaces where the different mountains of the world are located, and valleys of the world as well as the depths of the deepest oceans carved into its surface.
Finally at some point in all my work back in those days I started thinking if all the built in graphics on that big globe were all that necessary to do my work. I stopped and wondered if there was really anything different about that big globe that I needed specifically THAT globe for besides the fact that it is positioned strategically at the front entrance to the Geology Museum. I gave some thought to how I might be able to use just any old basic globe and possibly have to try discarding the ability to view all the built in graphics and if all the graphics had ever had that much to do with the accuracy I was achieving in the first place. Looking back I want to say today that the graphics are very valuable, but it was mostly the globe showing me where Central and South America are positioned in relation to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico that I’d been sold on all that time. Of course all of those graphics were certainly instrumental in all of this, since it was only two days ago July 25, 2013, I was up there using it to check out the Himalayas and where they are situated with respect to Mandalay, and Taiwan.
It wasn’t long before I spotted a globe for ninety-nine cents at a store and grabbed it! First using a piece of string to delineate a straight line around it, then eventually going to the edge of a sheet of paper and after wrapping it nicely around the globe on a few occasions realizing I should put a piece of tape on it and make it a permanent tool specifically for that use. Eventually I would need another tool to calibrate it so that it would automatically adjust to the 24,000 mile circumference of the earth, although automatically adjust is hardly the word for that operation. That is the system I use today and it works well for typhoons and tropical cyclones out in the islands of the Pacific that might be sending their energy towards our West Coast as well as Major Typhoons that strike Japan, especially from the South China Sea which routinely send their potential seismic energy directly towards Southern Oregon and Northern California as well as probably many other specific points up and down our West Coast.
I was thinking along the lines of somebody, somewhere having the desire to track some of these using basically the same method as I have been using and therefore thought it should be this one specific chapter in my new book, Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
Along the way I have spent a certain amount of time wondering if there will ever be a point in time when folks who live in shaky places will ever know enough to watch those distant and far, far away places for tropical cyclones and major typhoons, in addition to hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific, in order to help them know there just might be a major earthquake heading for them. Well, if this describes you, then it is now time to start paying very close attention to every single major windstorm striking basically anywhere in the world. You will also want to be watching for major winter storms and major blizzards especially. We had one particularly severe month over this winter and I can honestly tell you I heard the weather people say more than once that it was as bad or worse than December of 2003, or December of 2009! I can hardly believe what I am hearing sometime when they say such stuff! I’m still astonished to this day when they just blurt out such stuff without giving any thought to what they’re saying, although it’s probably just me who realizes that. Oh, and those severe winter conditions of December 2003 preceded the Paso Robles Earthquake of December 23, 2003, and I actually had sent out an EQ Alert based on all that snow in the days prior to that earthquake. December 2009 experienced some pretty severe winter conditions, too, and December 22, 2009 was the date of one of my all time best Official Predictions for a Major Earthquake to Strike California before January 12, 2010. That was when the Eureka, California earthquake struck on January 9, 2010 and on the final day of that O.P. at 4pm in the afternoon the Haiti Earthquake struck!
Major Tropical Cyclones making landfall at Australia, which they will from time to time do, don’t usually immediately affect us here in the United States and so you might not just be so interested. However they will immediately affect New Zealand and the other outlying islands there and eventually Indonesia and Japan for those of you reading with some concern for those places, and pretty much everywhere up around the Himalayan Arc eventually, too, and I’m sure there are a few who will want to know that, too.
That is one area where I will remain hopeful into the future that we will come up with some way of even MORE accurately tracking the movement of the Indian Ocean Tectonic Plate or the Australian Tectonic Plate or the more commonly referred to combined movement of them together referred to as the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate. Although in reality they are two separate tectonic plates, of course. Only the slightest of movements ever recorded in between them, although I have seen one of around a 6 in recent years. As I write this there does not seem to be any way to accurately guess the movement of this plate other than to watch around the perimeter when we know it is moving, aside from direct contact with a straight line of earthquake energy.
When a huge tropical cyclone strikes it from the Pacific, watch for it to turn and push north. Occasionally a cyclone will also make landfall in the Bay of Bengals and could have the same effect, but can commonly also cause the straight line effect at least up into those Himalayas and out into the islands of Indonesia and up into Japan. I’ve also heard they can get major earthquakes in Taiwan but haven’t seen one, yet.
Only very recently I have correlated the “Path on the Ground” of a Major Tornado with major earthquakes and it was only a few days ago as of this writing that I followed that straight line directly from the path of the El Reno, Oklahoma tornado to the islands of Antiqua and Barbuda out in the Caribbean on Friday and put that in the headline of an EQ Blog, when early that Sunday Morning a 3.8 hit two miles off the coast of Antiqua. I have to say, though, that the path on the ground of a tornado remains still somewhat difficult to get. There is a sort of general assumed path that usually just goes like due east and maybe a little to the north and I find myself occasionally sometimes using that for a line to get started, but some lines go in other directions and getting this sort of information remains a problem right up to today as I am writing this. Another tiny fact that will probably need to be collected a little more expediently in the future for the purposes of much more accurate and speedy earthquake forecasting all around the world.
That Antiqua Earthquake just so happened to also occur within what I only recently began referring to as a “New Moon Window,” and have incorporated the New Moon in a manner similar to how I have been using the Full Moon for a couple years, now. Based solely on the fact that it has been said that the chances of a Major Earthquake seem to increase with the Full Moon, and as you might have already read I have put that to use.
Then one day somebody said that if the full moon has that effect, then the New Moon must also have the same effect due to both, apparently according to him, causing that same increase in the pull on Earths gravity or whatever. That was when I began using my today still brand new “New Moon Alert.” There have just since I began using it, been several good ones, too, now as of the June New Moon of 2013, including Antiqua! So you can add the June New Moon of the year 2013 to the list of things that are helping us at Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
This chapter was supposed to give the reader everything he or she would need to know in order to track potential earthquake energy and be able to predict about when and where the next major earthquake might strike.
One of the biggest reasons I thought some of you might be interested in learning a little something about how I have been doing this for many years now is for the purpose of figuring out when and where one might strike and if one of these just so happens to be your neighborhood, then you might wish to share this information with your neighbors or friends or basically just about anybody in the general area or region. Especially if you happen to have gotten a hold of this volume before there is yet such a thing as regular warnings when me and you both know there MIGHT be a Major Earthquake coming. If not then it may still be up to you the reader, to watch for huge hurricanes, tropical storms, and typhoons to make landfall and then look on a map or globe to see if there’s an earthquake heading for you and then simply tell everybody you know in the area you think might be affected like via E-Mail, or maybe a friendly call or text message.
A rule of thumb I like to use here is small windstorm, say under 100mph, equals small earthquake say about a 5. Bigger windstorm, of say 100mph, equals bigger earthquake, say a 6. Huge windstorm, of say 150 or 175mph, equals huge earthquake of say like a 7 Magnitude. Finally, the very biggest of all Hurricanes and Typhoons of all time equals the very biggest of all Earthquakes of all time!
This was at one time an entire manuscript that I even had a literary agent for as well as a Compact Edition that I shopped to publishers myself calling it How To Predict Earthquakes--The Compact Edition, but never actually getting it published. I always wondered if the title made it sound too much like a “How To” book or not, although I guess it sort of was one, anyways. I’m thinking right now about renaming the chapter Tracking Earthquake Energy to reflect my current lingo I’m using. These days I kind of like the idea of tracking them.
So we can always watch TV and newspapers and the news in general and watch for all of these things that precede earthquakes, but I also want to say buildings CAN be constructed to withstand ever bigger earthquakes and existing buildings can be rated for exactly how big an earthquake they will hold up to. Buildings can also be strengthened to stand up to greater and greater shaking all the way up to what they call Seismic Isolators, like a shock absorber, that can take ALL the earthquake energy and leave a building with only minimal damage.
So knowing when and where a major earthquake might strike helps, but earthquake proof construction and retro-fitting is also needed in order to mitigate some of the existing hazards that are out there in some of the shakiest areas of the world.
Finally after you have the process of tracking every potential earthquake mastered, then there is one final thing you will someday also need to know and occasionally someone will ask this one, too. That is they want to know if there are currently ANY earthquakes heading for them or their friends or family wherever they might be.
Of course you must always remind people that earthquakes CAN still strike just about anywhere at any time, but if and when it just so happens that there are NO earthquakes heading for either yourself and your neighbors, or your friends and or family or any one specific place. . . then you might have to say, “All Clear!” Mumble might be the word because of course there is always that one chance something could strike some out of the way place without warning, however once in a while it happens that there are NO earthquakes especially heading towards, say L. A. or San Francisco. Whenever this does happen I might casually mention that it just may be sort of an All-Clear, but anymore that disclaimer always seems in order, too.
You might need to keep track of all this in a notebook, or on cards, so that you can keep track of the timetables once a huge windstorm strikes somewhere. Then it won’t be too long before you start noticing that earthquakes ARE striking on YOUR watch!
When all of that happens you should be ready to be the local EQ Guy or Gal in your neighborhood and you too can now be on your way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
As I write this today I still have that check right here and have not cashed it! I took some pictures of me with it yesterday and want to get a scan of it, yet if everybody thinks that would be ok. All along the way up to this point it has been my opinion that there might not be a way to ever make back any of the money I’d been putting into this project due to thinking along the lines of wanting to get the word out to as many people as possible and therefore such concepts as charging for the information were never an option for me. Granted there are outfits who do ask you for a fee in order to access their information or to receive their E-Mail, newsletter, or whatever with their latest earthquake information. Having spent a considerable amount of time contemplating the ethics involved with their methods, I decided quite early in my mission that it seemed I would probably NOT EVER be able to incorporate any money making angles into my work with earthquakes at all whatsoever. Reason being that all my efforts to get all of this key information out to the people in all of the affected areas who really need it the most, should probably not ever be slowed down, impaired, or hindered in any way especially so that a guy can be turning a dollar on the whole deal.
A fine example of that is the fact that I paid ninety-nine cents for the globe that I use to track earthquake energy all around the world and now having made my first income from all of that work, you could also say I more than paid for that globe!
Now on to the main subject of this chapter, and that is the business of how I track earthquakes. The globe is among the newest tools that I decided to employ along the way and the straight line tool that I use to make a straight line all the way around it is even newer. Maps are useful because you can follow a lot of the smaller lines directly to Major Earthquakes such as the line West from the landfall of Hurricane Hugo at Charleston, South Carolina in 1989 directly to the epicenter of the World Series Earthquake. I still have the map today where I originally tracked that event right after I had discovered the correlation and decided to check that one out to see for sure. That was actually the day in history when although I already probably knew there WAS a correlation. . . I did not know that it was straight line energy. I recall looking and all of the sudden just realizing that if you draw a line over the Alleghenies, across the plains of the Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains, and Sierra Mountains, you actually come right out at San Francisco!
Knowing that this kind of a hypothesis just might have some basis in reality, I looked very closely at Charleston and carefully placed a straight edge on what I thought the exact point of landfall might have been that day with the leading edge of the straight line now laying directly over the top of Northern California!
My words right at that moment were, “This can’t be true! It can not be this easy in the future to predict a Major Earthquake by using something so simple and basic as a straight line tool.” I was very familiar with the fact that Newton said something about energy traveling in a straight line, but I did not have any idea what kind of energy we were talking about right at that moment while all of this was happening on the map right in front of me. All in just the couple of moments that I looked down at whatever I was using for a straight line tool that day, laying across the map such as those I continue to use today for basically the same purpose. I seem to remember using a T-Square that day. Only difference being that it is now days for the purpose of trying to predict where the next Major Earthquake might strike. I can’t say for sure if it actually occurred to me right that moment that I would be using this system in reverse some day to track potential earthquake energy. That would be drawing a straight line from a hurricane that has just made landfall to the nearest major fault line for the purpose of then trying to guess where an earthquake might strike. Although it was still sort of early in the day when I made this discovery. . . by the end of that day I was sure to be Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
The concept of using the globe if I have not discussed it earlier, I originally discovered one day while I was visiting at UW Wisconsin Geology where they have a huge globe in the lobby out front of their Geology Museum. One day I was happening through there, and I know I discuss those visits elsewhere, and I ran into the big giant globe there. I couldn’t believe how all the continents looked so much different on this big globe! Next, I glanced up at the region where a hurricane had just made landfall around Florida bearing west, or southwest and following what I knew at the time to be the exact straight line I can clearly recall coming out somewhere around Guatemala or Guatemala City. This struck me as even a rather curious finding at the time possibly due to my not knowing much about the exact geography of the Gulf of Mexico and Central America. Probably thinking or mumbling to myself something like, “That line can’t possibly come out all the way down there in Guatemala or Guatemala City,” or wherever it came out on that day. The real great kicker in this whole story came when just a few days later whatever point on that globe I managed to track to using that ever so straight line and even just eyeballing it at that, brought me out somewhere down in Central America, BUT at the EXACT POINT where the epicenter of a Major Earthquake struck almost immediately!!! WHEN I saw the name of that city, whatever one it actually was because I do not recall for sure, I was astounded! I looked, looked, and looked at the map showing the epicenter and asked myself HOW did I manage to come up with the name of that city? Then it occurred to me it was the name I came up with when I followed the line with the use of that big giant globe up there in front of the Geology Museum at the University of Wisconsin, Madison!
It was very nearly impossible to believe that going from all of those maps that I have been using up to that point in time, that simply trying out the use of the globe in the Geology Museum could make that much difference. . . it did, though! It appeared right at that moment that the use of the globe gave me the ability to accurately track potential seismic energy everywhere around the world, I just had yet to actually prove it somehow.
I made a number of trips to check something out on that big giant globe which has actual raised surfaces where the different mountains of the world are located, and valleys of the world as well as the depths of the deepest oceans carved into its surface.
Finally at some point in all my work back in those days I started thinking if all the built in graphics on that big globe were all that necessary to do my work. I stopped and wondered if there was really anything different about that big globe that I needed specifically THAT globe for besides the fact that it is positioned strategically at the front entrance to the Geology Museum. I gave some thought to how I might be able to use just any old basic globe and possibly have to try discarding the ability to view all the built in graphics and if all the graphics had ever had that much to do with the accuracy I was achieving in the first place. Looking back I want to say today that the graphics are very valuable, but it was mostly the globe showing me where Central and South America are positioned in relation to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico that I’d been sold on all that time. Of course all of those graphics were certainly instrumental in all of this, since it was only two days ago July 25, 2013, I was up there using it to check out the Himalayas and where they are situated with respect to Mandalay, and Taiwan.
It wasn’t long before I spotted a globe for ninety-nine cents at a store and grabbed it! First using a piece of string to delineate a straight line around it, then eventually going to the edge of a sheet of paper and after wrapping it nicely around the globe on a few occasions realizing I should put a piece of tape on it and make it a permanent tool specifically for that use. Eventually I would need another tool to calibrate it so that it would automatically adjust to the 24,000 mile circumference of the earth, although automatically adjust is hardly the word for that operation. That is the system I use today and it works well for typhoons and tropical cyclones out in the islands of the Pacific that might be sending their energy towards our West Coast as well as Major Typhoons that strike Japan, especially from the South China Sea which routinely send their potential seismic energy directly towards Southern Oregon and Northern California as well as probably many other specific points up and down our West Coast.
I was thinking along the lines of somebody, somewhere having the desire to track some of these using basically the same method as I have been using and therefore thought it should be this one specific chapter in my new book, Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
Along the way I have spent a certain amount of time wondering if there will ever be a point in time when folks who live in shaky places will ever know enough to watch those distant and far, far away places for tropical cyclones and major typhoons, in addition to hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific, in order to help them know there just might be a major earthquake heading for them. Well, if this describes you, then it is now time to start paying very close attention to every single major windstorm striking basically anywhere in the world. You will also want to be watching for major winter storms and major blizzards especially. We had one particularly severe month over this winter and I can honestly tell you I heard the weather people say more than once that it was as bad or worse than December of 2003, or December of 2009! I can hardly believe what I am hearing sometime when they say such stuff! I’m still astonished to this day when they just blurt out such stuff without giving any thought to what they’re saying, although it’s probably just me who realizes that. Oh, and those severe winter conditions of December 2003 preceded the Paso Robles Earthquake of December 23, 2003, and I actually had sent out an EQ Alert based on all that snow in the days prior to that earthquake. December 2009 experienced some pretty severe winter conditions, too, and December 22, 2009 was the date of one of my all time best Official Predictions for a Major Earthquake to Strike California before January 12, 2010. That was when the Eureka, California earthquake struck on January 9, 2010 and on the final day of that O.P. at 4pm in the afternoon the Haiti Earthquake struck!
Major Tropical Cyclones making landfall at Australia, which they will from time to time do, don’t usually immediately affect us here in the United States and so you might not just be so interested. However they will immediately affect New Zealand and the other outlying islands there and eventually Indonesia and Japan for those of you reading with some concern for those places, and pretty much everywhere up around the Himalayan Arc eventually, too, and I’m sure there are a few who will want to know that, too.
That is one area where I will remain hopeful into the future that we will come up with some way of even MORE accurately tracking the movement of the Indian Ocean Tectonic Plate or the Australian Tectonic Plate or the more commonly referred to combined movement of them together referred to as the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate. Although in reality they are two separate tectonic plates, of course. Only the slightest of movements ever recorded in between them, although I have seen one of around a 6 in recent years. As I write this there does not seem to be any way to accurately guess the movement of this plate other than to watch around the perimeter when we know it is moving, aside from direct contact with a straight line of earthquake energy.
When a huge tropical cyclone strikes it from the Pacific, watch for it to turn and push north. Occasionally a cyclone will also make landfall in the Bay of Bengals and could have the same effect, but can commonly also cause the straight line effect at least up into those Himalayas and out into the islands of Indonesia and up into Japan. I’ve also heard they can get major earthquakes in Taiwan but haven’t seen one, yet.
Only very recently I have correlated the “Path on the Ground” of a Major Tornado with major earthquakes and it was only a few days ago as of this writing that I followed that straight line directly from the path of the El Reno, Oklahoma tornado to the islands of Antiqua and Barbuda out in the Caribbean on Friday and put that in the headline of an EQ Blog, when early that Sunday Morning a 3.8 hit two miles off the coast of Antiqua. I have to say, though, that the path on the ground of a tornado remains still somewhat difficult to get. There is a sort of general assumed path that usually just goes like due east and maybe a little to the north and I find myself occasionally sometimes using that for a line to get started, but some lines go in other directions and getting this sort of information remains a problem right up to today as I am writing this. Another tiny fact that will probably need to be collected a little more expediently in the future for the purposes of much more accurate and speedy earthquake forecasting all around the world.
That Antiqua Earthquake just so happened to also occur within what I only recently began referring to as a “New Moon Window,” and have incorporated the New Moon in a manner similar to how I have been using the Full Moon for a couple years, now. Based solely on the fact that it has been said that the chances of a Major Earthquake seem to increase with the Full Moon, and as you might have already read I have put that to use.
Then one day somebody said that if the full moon has that effect, then the New Moon must also have the same effect due to both, apparently according to him, causing that same increase in the pull on Earths gravity or whatever. That was when I began using my today still brand new “New Moon Alert.” There have just since I began using it, been several good ones, too, now as of the June New Moon of 2013, including Antiqua! So you can add the June New Moon of the year 2013 to the list of things that are helping us at Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
This chapter was supposed to give the reader everything he or she would need to know in order to track potential earthquake energy and be able to predict about when and where the next major earthquake might strike.
One of the biggest reasons I thought some of you might be interested in learning a little something about how I have been doing this for many years now is for the purpose of figuring out when and where one might strike and if one of these just so happens to be your neighborhood, then you might wish to share this information with your neighbors or friends or basically just about anybody in the general area or region. Especially if you happen to have gotten a hold of this volume before there is yet such a thing as regular warnings when me and you both know there MIGHT be a Major Earthquake coming. If not then it may still be up to you the reader, to watch for huge hurricanes, tropical storms, and typhoons to make landfall and then look on a map or globe to see if there’s an earthquake heading for you and then simply tell everybody you know in the area you think might be affected like via E-Mail, or maybe a friendly call or text message.
A rule of thumb I like to use here is small windstorm, say under 100mph, equals small earthquake say about a 5. Bigger windstorm, of say 100mph, equals bigger earthquake, say a 6. Huge windstorm, of say 150 or 175mph, equals huge earthquake of say like a 7 Magnitude. Finally, the very biggest of all Hurricanes and Typhoons of all time equals the very biggest of all Earthquakes of all time!
This was at one time an entire manuscript that I even had a literary agent for as well as a Compact Edition that I shopped to publishers myself calling it How To Predict Earthquakes--The Compact Edition, but never actually getting it published. I always wondered if the title made it sound too much like a “How To” book or not, although I guess it sort of was one, anyways. I’m thinking right now about renaming the chapter Tracking Earthquake Energy to reflect my current lingo I’m using. These days I kind of like the idea of tracking them.
So we can always watch TV and newspapers and the news in general and watch for all of these things that precede earthquakes, but I also want to say buildings CAN be constructed to withstand ever bigger earthquakes and existing buildings can be rated for exactly how big an earthquake they will hold up to. Buildings can also be strengthened to stand up to greater and greater shaking all the way up to what they call Seismic Isolators, like a shock absorber, that can take ALL the earthquake energy and leave a building with only minimal damage.
So knowing when and where a major earthquake might strike helps, but earthquake proof construction and retro-fitting is also needed in order to mitigate some of the existing hazards that are out there in some of the shakiest areas of the world.
Finally after you have the process of tracking every potential earthquake mastered, then there is one final thing you will someday also need to know and occasionally someone will ask this one, too. That is they want to know if there are currently ANY earthquakes heading for them or their friends or family wherever they might be.
Of course you must always remind people that earthquakes CAN still strike just about anywhere at any time, but if and when it just so happens that there are NO earthquakes heading for either yourself and your neighbors, or your friends and or family or any one specific place. . . then you might have to say, “All Clear!” Mumble might be the word because of course there is always that one chance something could strike some out of the way place without warning, however once in a while it happens that there are NO earthquakes especially heading towards, say L. A. or San Francisco. Whenever this does happen I might casually mention that it just may be sort of an All-Clear, but anymore that disclaimer always seems in order, too.
You might need to keep track of all this in a notebook, or on cards, so that you can keep track of the timetables once a huge windstorm strikes somewhere. Then it won’t be too long before you start noticing that earthquakes ARE striking on YOUR watch!
When all of that happens you should be ready to be the local EQ Guy or Gal in your neighborhood and you too can now be on your way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
Chapter 8--EQ Guy Meets Chicago Film Production
I had been gone from the Chicago Acting and Film Production scene for many years by time I returned from California, and when I went to find an agent or anybody who was doing casting I suddenly realized I no longer knew anybody. I took a few of the usual snap shots, I think these were still 3 x 5’s from a roll of film or disposable camera and started looking for what was going on in Chicago as far as film production. The year was 2003 now and I’d missed a lot. My main casting agency had left town all the way back at the Turn Of The Century and for the longest time I really had no idea what I was going to do. Somehow I ended up finding a list of current agents who were presently working in Chicago and managed to find out who was presently casting for the NBC-TV Series, ER By that time the show had been on quite a long time and since I’d already worked it once or twice in Chicago as well as at the studios in Hollywood, I was probably thinking it might be nice to make yet another appearance on that show. This was never to happen since it was now yet another agency I’d never worked for much less ever heard of and that was basically just about the end of it right there. I never knew why, but I never ever received no phone calls from that agency whose name I won’t say here.
I went on for quite a long time taking more pictures every so often and wondering if I would ever work in Chicago Film Production ever again.
Then it was ironic when I ended up working on a Major Motion Picture in Milwaukee at the new Miller Park, the baseball stadium built in Milwaukee in the 1990’s to replace the old County Stadium and is home to the Milwaukee Brewers, because my next big movie job back home ended up not even being in Chicago! It was the movie Mr. 3000 starring Bernie Mac, where he plays Stan Ross, a baseball player who retired with 3000 hits and then had three of them stricken from his old record and rejoined the team for the purpose of making three more hits to make his old record good. I know we sure worked a lot of days there at that baseball park and filmed a lot of baseball, too! At one point I was in the front row between home plate and first base and Bernie Mac came over and was talking to the guys right next to me and I actually got to shake his hand. That was when I knew I was really getting back into the swing of film production back home again, although with a note of sympathy for Bernie Mac passing.
Later when us same three guys were in those same seats, I noticed the camera was Zooming-In on us at the end of the, “Weiner Race.” I told the guys it looked like it was going to a Close-Up of us right there at the end of the Weiner Race and that at the end of the race we should go into a huge scene of cheering and high-fiving and all that and try to look real excited for the camera since it appears we are right there in the shot!
Well that is exactly what we did and you can still see us today at the end of the big Weiner Race there just a high-fiving and all excited and all that! The version in the movie theater anyways, I didn’t see us on the DVD version. That was one of those game changers as far as wondering if I’d ever be working in film production back home and it was a great feeling to know it now looked like I’d be in.
There would now be many others in my future as well as a lot of advancements to come in the business of tracking earthquakes. In fact one of my all time favorites happened at about this same time one day when I was watching some TV and an earthquake expert comes on the TV telling about the latest earthquake early warning system. So he goes on and on about how he was busily improving his system in order to better be able to give warning when it detects earthquakes in nearby areas, especially ones big enough that could do major damage or cause personal injury when they shake. Then at some point in all of his explaining, I realized he was a person from a nearby college and headed up there to the University of Wisconsin at Madison at once!
That would be the day I met Professor Richard Allen, today of UC Berkeley, but at that time still in Wisconsin at UW Madison. We talked about a lot of things of course to do with earthquakes and I can recall showing him on a big map on the wall of his office there in what I today know to be Weeks Hall, named for a Petroleum Geologist who discovered a lot of oil in his days and went on to work for oil companies. Citation: Australian Dictionary of Biography, Lewis George Weeks, 1913-1977 @ http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/weeks-lewis-george-11994
When I was all through there that day, of course I would return there on several other occasions and have stopped to visit him at least once at UC Berkeley as of this writing, when I finished that day could be when I discovered the huge globe in the lobby there in the same Geology Building at the entrance to the Geology Museum.
That would be the globe where I discovered how a lot of the different tectonic plates move by looking it over and because it is in graphic relief, I could clearly recognize all the mountains and fault lines around the world. This was also where I followed earthquake energy from a hurricane that had just made landfall somewhere around Florida and tracked it, using that globe, to a specific point I cannot say for sure if it was the same trip up there or a later one when I made this discovery. In any event when the earthquake struck I found that my estimate was now only fifty miles off!
In the years that had preceded this incident I had strived to perfect my system with the hope that someday I might be able to come a lot closer than a thousand miles on a regular basis and I was now astonished to see that somehow I had just came within fifty miles!
I thought, and thought, and thought about what I did different that I tracked this one all the way down into some little country in Central America and was within fifty miles of where this new major earthquake just struck. If I had even known to look a lot closer I could have even had a direct hit due to the fact that it appeared I may have just randomly picked the name of the nearest big city such as Guatemala City and not looked just a little bit farther west to where the most active fault line was nearby. . . and probably where the earthquake turned out to be. This was the point where I knew I was truly beginning to be Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
Richard Allen was the person who referred me to the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and insisted I submit to them immediately. While my answer to him right at that moment was that I didn’t want to send the current one due to it not being a big enough alert that it required an Official Prediction submitted to CEPEC, he continued to insist I submit it to them just the same. I told him I certainly would as soon as one that I considered a major one came along and eventually that satisfied him.
We also discussed the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and he told me everything all about that organization, too. While it was not exactly in existence at the time, it was reorganized since that conversation and I have submitted to them on a regular basis ever since. Pretty much all my work with CEPEC, and NEPEC, you could say I owe to my having met Richard Allen today of UC Berkeley Seismology.
I also want to credit him with, but am not sure he had so much to do with the fact that at the time I met him I had only tracked earthquake energy from hurricanes that made landfall along our East Coast or Gulf of Mexico. I never paid any attention to big windstorms on the other side of the world and was not able to begin to figure out how that would even work, anyways. It was some time after one of our meetings that I felt like maybe it was time to start watching typhoons in the Pacific to see what affect their landfalls might have and where the resultant earthquakes might strike.
One of the first such typhoons struck a little island out in the middle of the Pacific by the name of Niue. It looked like if things worked the same out there in the middle of the Pacific as they had so far everywhere else, then there might be an earthquake way up there in Alaska somewhere. It wouldn’t be too long before a Major Earthquake struck Alaska and I was not only on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life. . . I was now on the brink of Bringing Earthquakes To Life all the way around the World!
It started to be more and more obvious to me that my new system, possibly due at least in part to the addition of the globe, would work the same everywhere else in the world that I would try to use it! After several other ones such as that at different places around the world I knew it for sure!
Tracking Earthquake Energy All Around The World quickly became my brand new slogan that I would start using everywhere. Earthquakes would no longer be a hobby that I mostly partook in during the Atlantic Hurricane Season. With the new addition of typhoons in the Pacific and an occasional tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean, there was now earthquake work for me to do on a year around basis.
Cyclone Debbie would became one of the first such tropical cyclones that required me to begin checking into as soon as it made landfall on December 20, 2003. With winds reported of up to 200 miles per hour, I knew this huge windstorm would mean a lot of brand new major earthquake energy, it was just a matter of where it would strike. I checked the other side of the globe, found Australia, found the straight line, and simply tracked it right to Sao Paolo, Brazil and I thought I was done.
Days later the huge earthquake that I knew was coming struck Bam, Iran and it measured 8000 miles off from where I came out on my globe. This literally became my new line of study on a day to day basis. Instead of my continuing studies of earthquakes and reading whatever book towards a broader knowledge, I would instead pick up various maps of the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate in an ongoing attempt to figure out how and why that major earthquake energy traveled so far north of Australia and why it was released all of the way up in Iran.
I can recall a lot of hours spent looking along the lines where it borders with Africa, Antarctica, Indonesia, the Pacific, and etc. Finally one day I was just standing back and looking at the whole bigger picture of the broad outline of the Indian Ocean/Australian Tectonic Plate when I discovered it was crescent shaped. That was it! That had to be the answer, since I found that Iran was situated at the top of the plate and it was obvious to me that was the direction it had just moved with the actual epicenter of the Bam, Iran earthquake very near the actual plate boundary.
The discovery of that movement of the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate turned out to be probably one of my biggest discoveries on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life, too!
Today I can honestly tell you that I was correct and have put that discovery to use many times since that date and use it quite regularly today.
One of the first times I put it to use was in September of 2004 after Hurricane Ivan made landfall at Gulf Shores, Alabama near the Panhandle of Florida at 2am on September 16, 2004. Now, with what I had just recently learned back at the end of 2003, I was able to track the new earthquake energy to the TOP of the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate and guess that it would now probably move in the exact opposite direction thereby affecting California. It was just twelve days later when the Parkfield Earthquake struck at Parkfield, California on September 28, 2004 and that was when I knew I was really Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
There was a calendar that I had drawn by hand of the month of September 2004 that had Hurricane Ivan circled and the word “EQ” circled and I had noticed one day that where it said “EQ” was the date of the Parkfield Earthquake. So I enlarged this drawing on a color copy machine and actually included it as a page in my first earthquake book which I’m sure I discuss in full somewhere else in this volume that I am actually trying not to write chronologically.
I discovered in the time that has passed since this calendar was all drawn up that October 1, 2004 was also an eruption of Mt. St. Helens, although as of this writing I do not have a lot of experience with volcanoes other than that they show up in my research from time to time. I can’t honestly say for sure if I mentioned Mt. St. Helens or not in any alerts prior to that date, but I can tell you the name did come up a lot of times back then, and that big volcano has been fairly silent lately, too, if you know what I mean.
The calendar page I was discussing was at one time a method I used to keep track of hurricanes, typhoons, tropical cyclones, and tropical storms and of course the earthquakes that I knew would always follow. I went on eventually to create an entire card for the purpose of filling out when a hurricane, typhoon, or cyclone makes landfall with blanks for wind speed, direction, and what cities might get earthquakes following the landfall. I still use these from time to time but have lately spun that process off into smaller sheets where I simply write the name of the windstorm across the top and pencil in the details as they come in. I’m thinking now as I write this that I might just create a smaller version of my “Hurricane Card” the size of these smaller sheets made from one-quarter of an 8 ½ x 11 sheet. The process of writing all of this stuff all down and keeping track of it all was also mentioned in Chapter 7, and so you might also be interested in using one of the above systems that I just went into some additional detail on there.
I’m sure the whole story about my first book and Literary Agency and all that appears elsewhere in this volume so I won’t go into a lot of those details here. I had also edited that first book down into a “Compact Edition” that I did send to my agent and she replied she would need a whole new contract for it and so I decided if she didn’t mind I would shop that version to publishers myself.
As a result there could be any number of those manuscripts still out there at different publishers out around California whom I won’t mention here because I might still someday want to publish that “Compact Edition” of my first book How To Predict Earthquakes.
While it may not have exactly been the next renaissance in Chicago Film Production this was all happening at about the time a movie called Stranger Than Fiction was in production in Chicago. I had a good part in that movie that of course changed when I got there, but the biggest part of that movie was working with Dustin Hoffman and Will Farrel. When it was time to go to the set they were both standing right there elbow to elbow with me as the director told all of us at the same time what we would be doing that day. Maybe two, maybe three takes and the day was over, but still one of my better days considering.
At about this same time one of the other agencies in Chicago must have been doing all the casting for a new show that was called Prison Break because I met up with all of these guys on a later project called Eagle Eye which actually turned out to be my first Dreamworks Production that I had ever worked on. Thereafter I came to work with the people from Atmosphere Casting Chicago many times including a big scene ice skating at Chicago’s Millennium Park in a scene with Patrick Swayze in The Beast. I had enjoyed working with him and was very sorry to hear he passed on one day. You might check out Patrick Swayze as Orry Main in North and South! Great Mini-Series from 1975! Upon a check of the Internet Movie Database, I also found Patrick Swayze was in Dirty Dancing, and Red Dawn and of course more great acting, too! We’ll sure miss him!
You can actually see me in Eagle Eye where they get off the bus at some point in the movie. I didn’t even know on the day I worked that the girl with the baseball cap on actually turned out to be one of the stars of that movie until I saw it in the theatre!
This probably happened well before that movie job, but one day there was an auction where they had several old IBM Thinkpad Laptops and I was lucky enough to win the bidding on three of them. I picked out the best one and had Windows 95 loaded into it somewhere, and I started writing my first Earthquake Book on it. This would have been late in the year 2003 because I was busy writing that book on that new laptop with Windows 95 when severe winter conditions just so happened to come along that December. By Mid-December of 2003 the conditions became so bad that I was forced to write-up and send out what is today my first EQ Alert via E-Mail that is a good one concerning severe winter conditions. Of course there are a few other great saved ones from those days but I think I discuss all that at other parts of this book.
There was also a movie I worked on somewhere around this time that was titled “Just Visiting.” A medieval guy travels the streets of Chicago on a horse and one of the scenes I was in was a police chase of some kind and I believe all the cop cars were chasing Jean Reno riding on his horse on a street that crosses at the south end of LaSalle Street in Downtown Chicago because one of my positions that day was standing right in front of one of those big bank buildings or whatever they are there on LaSalle Street. Just looking up this movie I found the release date was 2001 and the Extras Casting person was still my original casting director from the 1990’s. So it is possible that I worked on this movie before ever leaving for Los Angeles in say 1999. It appears this movie was a remake of a French movie from 1993 titled Les Visiteurs, also starring Jean Reno.
Looking back now I can honestly say that I didn’t really have all that much experience tracking major earthquake energy when Super Typhoon Nanmadol made landfall at the Philippines on December 2, 2004 and it was so huge and did so much damage that it was really big news. Back in those days I had a different system than the one I use today. In those days I would go by the amount of news coverage they gave to a big windstorm and wait to see if it was so big, that there was a lot of news coverage. Whenever there was, I would then be convinced that there would then be a Major Earthquake to follow. Today I just glance at the wind speeds and decide. So the landfall of Super Typhoon Nanmadol caused the most amount of damage of any typhoon in history and I immediately began following along to see when and where this next new Major Earthquake would be striking.
I followed a lot of foreshocks that were the movement of different tectonic plates until two days before Christmas on December 23, 2004 there was an 8.1 Richters Earthquake at Macquarie Island and I knew all of this new earthquake energy was headed right for those major populated areas when on December 24, 2004 at around 8:30am, I wrote an E-Mail titled “Big EQ Alert” saying as big as 9 or 10 Richters and the Great Sumatra Earthquake struck like two days later.
One day after the landfall of Cyclone Nargis also one of the biggest of all time, I was driving along in my car when it occurred to me that the region in the Bay of Bengals where it made landfall was actually still the Indian Ocean Tectonic Plate while the actual plate boundary was located all the way up in the mountains of China. I also realized there was a huge reservoir up that way that they had begun filling and would likely mean a giant earthquake as well. Well, it was not much of a surprise when on May 12, 2008 the Great Sichuan, China Earthquake struck and I could even see the “Three Gorges Dam” on the map just a few hundred miles from the epicenter.
Somewhere around that same time since I am actually not trying to write this book chronologically, was the landfall at Louisiana of Hurricane Katrina. Now up to this point in the book I do not know if that really tells you anything or not. Just another hurricane making landfall? Or are you saying that such a big hurricane like Katrina should equal something? Well, it did equal something and that something is today the Great Islamabad Earthquake. I just so happened to get a phone call from the Carpenters Union somewhere in between these two big events and explained the whole situation to the guy on the other end of the line. His reply was that he understood completely and actually has a brother who is an Astrophysicist at Harvard who works on the Chandra Telescope. A few days later after the big earthquake struck at Islamabad, I took the next call from him and went right out on the next carpenter job and never heard no more about that. One thing I do know is they had always said all phone conversations were being recorded so that you could possibly hear me discuss Islamabad with my Carpenters Union boss several days before it happened! I believe my words were “It should be of biblical proportions; and will probably take place over in one of those biblical countries.” Not really sure, though if Islamabad is one of those biblical countries or not.
One of the bigger carpenter jobs I went on at about this same time, not sure if it was one of the calls I was talking about there though, was at a big factory where they make those huge draglines used in strip mining or open pit mining. I was lucky enough to have seen a lot of strip mining when we traveled the west when I was nine or ten in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, so I rather enjoyed walking past those huge buckets as big as a car or house everyday on my way into that plant to wherever we were working on any particular day. Yes, today I can now show you on Google Earth where all those giant strip mines were once located due to reclamation never coming to fruition out in Wyoming and Montana. I also actually met one girl at a store located a ways to the east of Helena, Montana who is still upset to this day because they timbered out all her trees. I was able to sympathize with her having seen it before they cut all the big trees and then strip mined a lot of it.
It was once beautiful lush forest with a babbling creek rushing past and opening up into a landscape surrounded by tall mountains with magnificent forests. Today it’s all flat and baron and so much for reclamation along the Musselshell River, there. . . but it is still Montana just the same. I also seen a lot of the big giant sequoias and redwood trees that are today mostly all gone, too, as well as even most recently a lot of big forests along the Pacific Coast line which I can today see on Google Earth are also now all baron plains just since I cruised there in the early 2000’s. That is unless they are enjoying some reclamation out that way. Perhaps I will discuss that in my next book that I’m planning to follow Bringing Earthquakes To Life to be primarily all about my experiences in California and lots of other things related to California and maybe, just maybe I’ll title that book Bringing California Earthquakes To Life
I went on for quite a long time taking more pictures every so often and wondering if I would ever work in Chicago Film Production ever again.
Then it was ironic when I ended up working on a Major Motion Picture in Milwaukee at the new Miller Park, the baseball stadium built in Milwaukee in the 1990’s to replace the old County Stadium and is home to the Milwaukee Brewers, because my next big movie job back home ended up not even being in Chicago! It was the movie Mr. 3000 starring Bernie Mac, where he plays Stan Ross, a baseball player who retired with 3000 hits and then had three of them stricken from his old record and rejoined the team for the purpose of making three more hits to make his old record good. I know we sure worked a lot of days there at that baseball park and filmed a lot of baseball, too! At one point I was in the front row between home plate and first base and Bernie Mac came over and was talking to the guys right next to me and I actually got to shake his hand. That was when I knew I was really getting back into the swing of film production back home again, although with a note of sympathy for Bernie Mac passing.
Later when us same three guys were in those same seats, I noticed the camera was Zooming-In on us at the end of the, “Weiner Race.” I told the guys it looked like it was going to a Close-Up of us right there at the end of the Weiner Race and that at the end of the race we should go into a huge scene of cheering and high-fiving and all that and try to look real excited for the camera since it appears we are right there in the shot!
Well that is exactly what we did and you can still see us today at the end of the big Weiner Race there just a high-fiving and all excited and all that! The version in the movie theater anyways, I didn’t see us on the DVD version. That was one of those game changers as far as wondering if I’d ever be working in film production back home and it was a great feeling to know it now looked like I’d be in.
There would now be many others in my future as well as a lot of advancements to come in the business of tracking earthquakes. In fact one of my all time favorites happened at about this same time one day when I was watching some TV and an earthquake expert comes on the TV telling about the latest earthquake early warning system. So he goes on and on about how he was busily improving his system in order to better be able to give warning when it detects earthquakes in nearby areas, especially ones big enough that could do major damage or cause personal injury when they shake. Then at some point in all of his explaining, I realized he was a person from a nearby college and headed up there to the University of Wisconsin at Madison at once!
That would be the day I met Professor Richard Allen, today of UC Berkeley, but at that time still in Wisconsin at UW Madison. We talked about a lot of things of course to do with earthquakes and I can recall showing him on a big map on the wall of his office there in what I today know to be Weeks Hall, named for a Petroleum Geologist who discovered a lot of oil in his days and went on to work for oil companies. Citation: Australian Dictionary of Biography, Lewis George Weeks, 1913-1977 @ http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/weeks-lewis-george-11994
When I was all through there that day, of course I would return there on several other occasions and have stopped to visit him at least once at UC Berkeley as of this writing, when I finished that day could be when I discovered the huge globe in the lobby there in the same Geology Building at the entrance to the Geology Museum.
That would be the globe where I discovered how a lot of the different tectonic plates move by looking it over and because it is in graphic relief, I could clearly recognize all the mountains and fault lines around the world. This was also where I followed earthquake energy from a hurricane that had just made landfall somewhere around Florida and tracked it, using that globe, to a specific point I cannot say for sure if it was the same trip up there or a later one when I made this discovery. In any event when the earthquake struck I found that my estimate was now only fifty miles off!
In the years that had preceded this incident I had strived to perfect my system with the hope that someday I might be able to come a lot closer than a thousand miles on a regular basis and I was now astonished to see that somehow I had just came within fifty miles!
I thought, and thought, and thought about what I did different that I tracked this one all the way down into some little country in Central America and was within fifty miles of where this new major earthquake just struck. If I had even known to look a lot closer I could have even had a direct hit due to the fact that it appeared I may have just randomly picked the name of the nearest big city such as Guatemala City and not looked just a little bit farther west to where the most active fault line was nearby. . . and probably where the earthquake turned out to be. This was the point where I knew I was truly beginning to be Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
Richard Allen was the person who referred me to the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and insisted I submit to them immediately. While my answer to him right at that moment was that I didn’t want to send the current one due to it not being a big enough alert that it required an Official Prediction submitted to CEPEC, he continued to insist I submit it to them just the same. I told him I certainly would as soon as one that I considered a major one came along and eventually that satisfied him.
We also discussed the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and he told me everything all about that organization, too. While it was not exactly in existence at the time, it was reorganized since that conversation and I have submitted to them on a regular basis ever since. Pretty much all my work with CEPEC, and NEPEC, you could say I owe to my having met Richard Allen today of UC Berkeley Seismology.
I also want to credit him with, but am not sure he had so much to do with the fact that at the time I met him I had only tracked earthquake energy from hurricanes that made landfall along our East Coast or Gulf of Mexico. I never paid any attention to big windstorms on the other side of the world and was not able to begin to figure out how that would even work, anyways. It was some time after one of our meetings that I felt like maybe it was time to start watching typhoons in the Pacific to see what affect their landfalls might have and where the resultant earthquakes might strike.
One of the first such typhoons struck a little island out in the middle of the Pacific by the name of Niue. It looked like if things worked the same out there in the middle of the Pacific as they had so far everywhere else, then there might be an earthquake way up there in Alaska somewhere. It wouldn’t be too long before a Major Earthquake struck Alaska and I was not only on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life. . . I was now on the brink of Bringing Earthquakes To Life all the way around the World!
It started to be more and more obvious to me that my new system, possibly due at least in part to the addition of the globe, would work the same everywhere else in the world that I would try to use it! After several other ones such as that at different places around the world I knew it for sure!
Tracking Earthquake Energy All Around The World quickly became my brand new slogan that I would start using everywhere. Earthquakes would no longer be a hobby that I mostly partook in during the Atlantic Hurricane Season. With the new addition of typhoons in the Pacific and an occasional tropical cyclone in the Indian Ocean, there was now earthquake work for me to do on a year around basis.
Cyclone Debbie would became one of the first such tropical cyclones that required me to begin checking into as soon as it made landfall on December 20, 2003. With winds reported of up to 200 miles per hour, I knew this huge windstorm would mean a lot of brand new major earthquake energy, it was just a matter of where it would strike. I checked the other side of the globe, found Australia, found the straight line, and simply tracked it right to Sao Paolo, Brazil and I thought I was done.
Days later the huge earthquake that I knew was coming struck Bam, Iran and it measured 8000 miles off from where I came out on my globe. This literally became my new line of study on a day to day basis. Instead of my continuing studies of earthquakes and reading whatever book towards a broader knowledge, I would instead pick up various maps of the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate in an ongoing attempt to figure out how and why that major earthquake energy traveled so far north of Australia and why it was released all of the way up in Iran.
I can recall a lot of hours spent looking along the lines where it borders with Africa, Antarctica, Indonesia, the Pacific, and etc. Finally one day I was just standing back and looking at the whole bigger picture of the broad outline of the Indian Ocean/Australian Tectonic Plate when I discovered it was crescent shaped. That was it! That had to be the answer, since I found that Iran was situated at the top of the plate and it was obvious to me that was the direction it had just moved with the actual epicenter of the Bam, Iran earthquake very near the actual plate boundary.
The discovery of that movement of the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate turned out to be probably one of my biggest discoveries on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life, too!
Today I can honestly tell you that I was correct and have put that discovery to use many times since that date and use it quite regularly today.
One of the first times I put it to use was in September of 2004 after Hurricane Ivan made landfall at Gulf Shores, Alabama near the Panhandle of Florida at 2am on September 16, 2004. Now, with what I had just recently learned back at the end of 2003, I was able to track the new earthquake energy to the TOP of the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate and guess that it would now probably move in the exact opposite direction thereby affecting California. It was just twelve days later when the Parkfield Earthquake struck at Parkfield, California on September 28, 2004 and that was when I knew I was really Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
There was a calendar that I had drawn by hand of the month of September 2004 that had Hurricane Ivan circled and the word “EQ” circled and I had noticed one day that where it said “EQ” was the date of the Parkfield Earthquake. So I enlarged this drawing on a color copy machine and actually included it as a page in my first earthquake book which I’m sure I discuss in full somewhere else in this volume that I am actually trying not to write chronologically.
I discovered in the time that has passed since this calendar was all drawn up that October 1, 2004 was also an eruption of Mt. St. Helens, although as of this writing I do not have a lot of experience with volcanoes other than that they show up in my research from time to time. I can’t honestly say for sure if I mentioned Mt. St. Helens or not in any alerts prior to that date, but I can tell you the name did come up a lot of times back then, and that big volcano has been fairly silent lately, too, if you know what I mean.
The calendar page I was discussing was at one time a method I used to keep track of hurricanes, typhoons, tropical cyclones, and tropical storms and of course the earthquakes that I knew would always follow. I went on eventually to create an entire card for the purpose of filling out when a hurricane, typhoon, or cyclone makes landfall with blanks for wind speed, direction, and what cities might get earthquakes following the landfall. I still use these from time to time but have lately spun that process off into smaller sheets where I simply write the name of the windstorm across the top and pencil in the details as they come in. I’m thinking now as I write this that I might just create a smaller version of my “Hurricane Card” the size of these smaller sheets made from one-quarter of an 8 ½ x 11 sheet. The process of writing all of this stuff all down and keeping track of it all was also mentioned in Chapter 7, and so you might also be interested in using one of the above systems that I just went into some additional detail on there.
I’m sure the whole story about my first book and Literary Agency and all that appears elsewhere in this volume so I won’t go into a lot of those details here. I had also edited that first book down into a “Compact Edition” that I did send to my agent and she replied she would need a whole new contract for it and so I decided if she didn’t mind I would shop that version to publishers myself.
As a result there could be any number of those manuscripts still out there at different publishers out around California whom I won’t mention here because I might still someday want to publish that “Compact Edition” of my first book How To Predict Earthquakes.
While it may not have exactly been the next renaissance in Chicago Film Production this was all happening at about the time a movie called Stranger Than Fiction was in production in Chicago. I had a good part in that movie that of course changed when I got there, but the biggest part of that movie was working with Dustin Hoffman and Will Farrel. When it was time to go to the set they were both standing right there elbow to elbow with me as the director told all of us at the same time what we would be doing that day. Maybe two, maybe three takes and the day was over, but still one of my better days considering.
At about this same time one of the other agencies in Chicago must have been doing all the casting for a new show that was called Prison Break because I met up with all of these guys on a later project called Eagle Eye which actually turned out to be my first Dreamworks Production that I had ever worked on. Thereafter I came to work with the people from Atmosphere Casting Chicago many times including a big scene ice skating at Chicago’s Millennium Park in a scene with Patrick Swayze in The Beast. I had enjoyed working with him and was very sorry to hear he passed on one day. You might check out Patrick Swayze as Orry Main in North and South! Great Mini-Series from 1975! Upon a check of the Internet Movie Database, I also found Patrick Swayze was in Dirty Dancing, and Red Dawn and of course more great acting, too! We’ll sure miss him!
You can actually see me in Eagle Eye where they get off the bus at some point in the movie. I didn’t even know on the day I worked that the girl with the baseball cap on actually turned out to be one of the stars of that movie until I saw it in the theatre!
This probably happened well before that movie job, but one day there was an auction where they had several old IBM Thinkpad Laptops and I was lucky enough to win the bidding on three of them. I picked out the best one and had Windows 95 loaded into it somewhere, and I started writing my first Earthquake Book on it. This would have been late in the year 2003 because I was busy writing that book on that new laptop with Windows 95 when severe winter conditions just so happened to come along that December. By Mid-December of 2003 the conditions became so bad that I was forced to write-up and send out what is today my first EQ Alert via E-Mail that is a good one concerning severe winter conditions. Of course there are a few other great saved ones from those days but I think I discuss all that at other parts of this book.
There was also a movie I worked on somewhere around this time that was titled “Just Visiting.” A medieval guy travels the streets of Chicago on a horse and one of the scenes I was in was a police chase of some kind and I believe all the cop cars were chasing Jean Reno riding on his horse on a street that crosses at the south end of LaSalle Street in Downtown Chicago because one of my positions that day was standing right in front of one of those big bank buildings or whatever they are there on LaSalle Street. Just looking up this movie I found the release date was 2001 and the Extras Casting person was still my original casting director from the 1990’s. So it is possible that I worked on this movie before ever leaving for Los Angeles in say 1999. It appears this movie was a remake of a French movie from 1993 titled Les Visiteurs, also starring Jean Reno.
Looking back now I can honestly say that I didn’t really have all that much experience tracking major earthquake energy when Super Typhoon Nanmadol made landfall at the Philippines on December 2, 2004 and it was so huge and did so much damage that it was really big news. Back in those days I had a different system than the one I use today. In those days I would go by the amount of news coverage they gave to a big windstorm and wait to see if it was so big, that there was a lot of news coverage. Whenever there was, I would then be convinced that there would then be a Major Earthquake to follow. Today I just glance at the wind speeds and decide. So the landfall of Super Typhoon Nanmadol caused the most amount of damage of any typhoon in history and I immediately began following along to see when and where this next new Major Earthquake would be striking.
I followed a lot of foreshocks that were the movement of different tectonic plates until two days before Christmas on December 23, 2004 there was an 8.1 Richters Earthquake at Macquarie Island and I knew all of this new earthquake energy was headed right for those major populated areas when on December 24, 2004 at around 8:30am, I wrote an E-Mail titled “Big EQ Alert” saying as big as 9 or 10 Richters and the Great Sumatra Earthquake struck like two days later.
One day after the landfall of Cyclone Nargis also one of the biggest of all time, I was driving along in my car when it occurred to me that the region in the Bay of Bengals where it made landfall was actually still the Indian Ocean Tectonic Plate while the actual plate boundary was located all the way up in the mountains of China. I also realized there was a huge reservoir up that way that they had begun filling and would likely mean a giant earthquake as well. Well, it was not much of a surprise when on May 12, 2008 the Great Sichuan, China Earthquake struck and I could even see the “Three Gorges Dam” on the map just a few hundred miles from the epicenter.
Somewhere around that same time since I am actually not trying to write this book chronologically, was the landfall at Louisiana of Hurricane Katrina. Now up to this point in the book I do not know if that really tells you anything or not. Just another hurricane making landfall? Or are you saying that such a big hurricane like Katrina should equal something? Well, it did equal something and that something is today the Great Islamabad Earthquake. I just so happened to get a phone call from the Carpenters Union somewhere in between these two big events and explained the whole situation to the guy on the other end of the line. His reply was that he understood completely and actually has a brother who is an Astrophysicist at Harvard who works on the Chandra Telescope. A few days later after the big earthquake struck at Islamabad, I took the next call from him and went right out on the next carpenter job and never heard no more about that. One thing I do know is they had always said all phone conversations were being recorded so that you could possibly hear me discuss Islamabad with my Carpenters Union boss several days before it happened! I believe my words were “It should be of biblical proportions; and will probably take place over in one of those biblical countries.” Not really sure, though if Islamabad is one of those biblical countries or not.
One of the bigger carpenter jobs I went on at about this same time, not sure if it was one of the calls I was talking about there though, was at a big factory where they make those huge draglines used in strip mining or open pit mining. I was lucky enough to have seen a lot of strip mining when we traveled the west when I was nine or ten in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, so I rather enjoyed walking past those huge buckets as big as a car or house everyday on my way into that plant to wherever we were working on any particular day. Yes, today I can now show you on Google Earth where all those giant strip mines were once located due to reclamation never coming to fruition out in Wyoming and Montana. I also actually met one girl at a store located a ways to the east of Helena, Montana who is still upset to this day because they timbered out all her trees. I was able to sympathize with her having seen it before they cut all the big trees and then strip mined a lot of it.
It was once beautiful lush forest with a babbling creek rushing past and opening up into a landscape surrounded by tall mountains with magnificent forests. Today it’s all flat and baron and so much for reclamation along the Musselshell River, there. . . but it is still Montana just the same. I also seen a lot of the big giant sequoias and redwood trees that are today mostly all gone, too, as well as even most recently a lot of big forests along the Pacific Coast line which I can today see on Google Earth are also now all baron plains just since I cruised there in the early 2000’s. That is unless they are enjoying some reclamation out that way. Perhaps I will discuss that in my next book that I’m planning to follow Bringing Earthquakes To Life to be primarily all about my experiences in California and lots of other things related to California and maybe, just maybe I’ll title that book Bringing California Earthquakes To Life
Chapter 9--Quake Chase, SAG Card, EQ Blog!
This might be a good place to start the most recent chapter with the latest and most up-to-date stuff that is all basically pretty much still currently going on as far as acting, Chicago Film Production, and all the latest stuff from my work with earthquakes.
A typhoon was coming up through the South China Sea one day in late September of 2011 when I started to notice it was headed right for the South of Japan. This particular direction of travel always gets my attention because if it is a direct hit at the South of Japan from the direction of the South China Sea it can mean a Major Earthquake might be heading directly for California. Well, that turned out to be exactly what Typhoon Roke did, too.
I tracked the new earthquake energy from the landfall of Typhoon Roke with my globe and straight line tool the best I could knowing it looked like it would soon be intersecting the lives of a lot of folks on the West Coast of the U.S. and the line went straight through Southern Oregon right where it shares a border with Northern California.
I began posting the information immediately as soon as I knew something was headed directly for Northern California like that. There had been several prior to this and some of my best ones, actually included one where the two readers had written me back thanking me which I discussed a while back in this book.
It wasn’t the first one that had looked so certain as this one did, and wasn’t the first time it had occurred to me to head to the city or region where a Major Earthquake was about to strike. The thought of going on a “Quake Chase” had occurred to me on a number of occasions before, and then someone left a comment on one of those EQ Blog entries in which I discussed this prediction. Someone pointed out that the October 2011 Full Moon would fall on October 12. Well, October 12 just so happened to also be Day 21 after the landfall of Typhoon Roke and I was immediately convinced it would surely be the day of this earthquake at Northern California or Southern Oregon around the region of Eureka, California, and Coos Bay, Oregon!
I was discussing driving out there in a chat room with some of my friends from around my hometown when one of them said it might be easier or cheaper to fly.
I checked and found it rather cheap to fly from Chicago to San Francisco and so I immediately bought a ticket to fly out there on October 11, the day before the October 2011 Full Moon.
I told the lady at the El Camino Motel on Mission Street that I wanted an upstairs room incase the earthquake flattened the building I didn’t want to be underneath it. I had originally wanted to rent a car and drive it up to Eureka, but looked at Eureka on Google Earth and it is almost right at sea level and would be a huge problem if too big of a tsunami resulted in the event the earthquake did actually strike and was too huge. I was also not sure how I would explain to the rent-a-car folks that I sustained a lot of damage in an earthquake that I knew was supposed to happen and that was a whole entire thing I didn’t want to get involved in, too! Finally there was also the problem of what to do if the earthquake strikes in San Francisco while I’m up in Eureka and it is so big that I then have difficulty getting back into the city, to the airport, and to return the car, etc. Not being all that familiar with the highways around that city could have made that very difficult in a Major Earthquake.
That was when I began looking up hotels close to SFO, the name of the San Francisco Airport. I decided I could go everywhere I needed to go on the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or B.A.R.T.
That was exactly what I did the minute I arrived was take B.A.R.T. from Colma station which was actually closer to my motel than the Daly City Station also nearby, to Millbrae where I caught the Cal-Train to Palo Alto actually closer to where I was going than the actual Menlo Park Station and with a better route for rollerblading/inline skating, too.
Upon arriving at the Palo Alto Station, I detrained from my Cal-Train, put my rollerblades on, and headed down Middlefield Road to the offices of the United States Geological Survey or USGS. There I found among other things the worlds largest typographical map store where I spent a moment looking around and eventually bought the one that included all the typography around my motel on Mission Street. Then it was on to find any of the offices of the USGS people I had on my prepared list. I went down the directory and compared all the names I had written down to all the names on their directory at the front of the building by the room where they have all the seismographs on display there.
The only name I recall finding was Jeanne Hardebeck and so I headed down the hall to her office carrying my rollerblades in the handbag that I carried with me along with my Quake Chase Nikes that I carried in my little stringy backpack thing along with that handbag for my Rollerblades when I wasn’t wearing them.
I hand delivered a printed out copy of the Official Prediction for Eureka, California to Jeanne Hardebeck who just so happened at the time to also be on the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, she no longer is, and it wasn’t long before I was out the door there putting my Rollerblades back on and heading to my next stop on the San Francisco road towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
So I pull my rollerblades out of my handbag along with my string backpack and put the rollerblades on and throw the shoes in the string bag and my next stop is the 711 across the street from the Palo Alto Cal-Train Station for an ice cold Slurpie! Then upon exiting Cal-Train at Millbrae Station, I take a quick side trip up to see the very beautiful San Andreas Lake and check out the San Andreas Trail which turned out not to be paved so no Rollerblading up there, although it will be a great trail for hiking for me on some later trip up that way. I had actually even seen the region once before during my time in L.A. having driven past it on one of my trips to the San Francisco area.
Got a beautiful shot of San Francisco Bay from the top of Millbrae Avenue there as I headed back down for the B.A.R.T. Station. With a couple of tall palm trees in the shot you can see the bay with the mountains in the background.
The next day was the day and night of the October 2011 Full Moon, although since then I have begun narrowing the full and new moons down to the exact moment and adding twenty-four hours before and after them to create what I call the Full or New Moon Window. Back in October of 2011 the full moon was October 12 and that was probably all there was to it. I was up early on the 12th and caught the express B.A.R.T train to Berkeley where I went to visit my old friend Professor Richard Allen of UC Berkeley and formerly from Seismology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You might remember when I visited him at the Geology Building in Madison and he told me to file with CEPEC, and NEPEC and also inspired me to track earthquakes all around the world. That was also where I discovered that big giant globe out front of the Geology Museum there and discovered how to use it to track earthquakes much more accurately.
Professor Allen was very glad to see me again and on this occasion he was very happy to show me the latest in Earthquake Early Warning software right there on his computer monitor. As he was showing it to me right at that moment it suddenly began to beep, buzz, ring, howl and squawk quite noisily right there before my eyes with an earthquake that had just struck around the border with Mexico. It then proceeded to begin counting down the number of seconds before the earthquake energy would be felt in his office and while it counted down the seconds, it also said it wouldn’t be felt there at his office where we were at inside McCone Hall at UC Berkeley. Although I clearly felt the slightest rumbling under my feet at the moment when it counted off to zero, and knew it was probably the earthquake energy from that one that just got done making the warning alarm howl.
Just then another one struck somewhere else around the Southern California area and it went through its whole routine all over again.
Our wonderful visit that day ended with the conversation about the L’Aquila Italy Seismologists matter. That was where Giampaolo Giuliani accurately predicted there would be a Major Earthquake at L’Aquila, Italy and had many people evacuated due to the elevated radon readings he had been getting in the area. Somewhere along the way the mayor disagreed with Giuliani and formed a committee of seismologists who determined there was no reason for concern and sent all the people back into their homes. Giuliani was allowed to keep his own family out and when an earthquake struck there a few days later 297 people died and Giuliani and his family survived.
Not too long afterwards the public conscience demanded the seismologists on that committee be charged with manslaughter and a trial was scheduled. This was where I took a couple of steps towards the door of Professor Allens office due to him being one of the first signatures that I saw on the petition to let the scientists go or whatever. Of course I was exuberant that they were standing trial with everything to GAIN by Earthquake Prediction going on trial over in Italy, but certainly controlled that excitement at this point, you understand. I simply took a few more steps towards the door there and at right about that point told Professor Allen that I didn’t want to take any more of his time and obviously had a lot of other stuff to do around Frisco. Although I might have briefly explained my position to him that I was happy to see the world was finally listening to some facts about earthquake prediction while at the same time very sorry it had to be at the hands of a “Heavy Handed” government and how sorry I was for his friends being chastised, some of whom I think the professor mentioned knowing personally although I did not get all those details. It made for a nice discussion with my old friend whom I originally met that day back in Wisconsin around the year 2002 when he was on the TV talking about a much earlier version of that same system.
That was the point where we shook hands and I then departed the office of my now old friend who I will surely meet up with again someday in the business of earthquakes, and seismology and who himself has been an enormous help to me on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
My next stop on the Bay Area Rapid Transit was Beautiful Downtown Hayward, California where I again put my Rollerblades on and took a real nice tour through all of their downtown including a lot of what looked to be the Hayward Fault. Then a stop at the Lucky Store for some chicken wings for my lunch and back on the B.A.R.T. to the San Francisco Zoo.
At the San Francisco Zoo I found the animals only mildly rowdy and not really seeming to be saying too big of an earthquake was just hours away as they should have been. This lead me to think smaller like 5.9 Richters Earthquake although I did not bother sending any such message out to my EQ Twitter from there and ironically if I had it would have been exactly right. Across the street from the zoo was the very beautiful Pacific Ocean where I jumped in and went for a long awaited swim. Next throwing my Rollerblades back on and heading up to San Francisco State University where I would catch the number 220 bus back to Colma B.A.R.T. Station.
The earthquake I had traveled out there for struck later that night at 8:15pm while I was crossing the street to the 711 for an ice cream cone that night. It gave one violent shake and several big aftershocks as I was crossing the street in the crosswalk and nearly threw me back across from south to north when it hit. The initial shock was a 5.9 that was later downgraded to a 5.3 and is still to this day by far one of the biggest Major Earthquakes to ever hit that area. The epicenter was just offshore from Coos Bay, Oregon just a few miles from Eureka, California as I had stated in the banner headline of the Official Prediction that I hand delivered to CEPEC immediately upon my arrival in San Francisco.
With the remaining days on my trip I visited Haight-Ashbury, and Golden Gate Park for some Rollerblading and took the boat out to Alcatraz. On Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 2:30 in the afternoon I was on my plane flying out of SFO to the tune of a song by a band called “Train” titled Save Me San Francisco. Coincidentally the last time I knew that was how the script for my movie “EQ Alert: The Movie” ended, too. Maybe as of the last time I updated it anyways. I’m sure it will be updated again before it gets made. . . maybe not. I was also thinking about including some of the scenes here in this volume, until it occurred to me that including that final scene would give away how that movie ends. It also occurred to me that maybe I should change the name of that movie to Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
You might think something like overnight becoming the Worlds First Official Quake Chaser would be a really big thing or that there could really be some media coverage to follow what I did. Well, I did get one story about my trip printed and am happy about that although I was a little disappointed that the Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t have a category for Earthquake Prediction, nor probably for Quake Chasing, either.
Just the same being on the front page was easily one of the biggest days of my life and I want to thank all of the people involved in making that become a reality, too.
The earthquake energy from the landfall of Typhoon Roke crossed California and while they did have a 5.9 the night of the full moon while I was out there, they got two more that appeared to have struck like directly under the city of Berkeley that week in the 4 Magnitude Range. That would not be the end of it, though, since the energy would continue on and cross Oklahoma where they got a 5.6 earthquake a few more days after I got home from San Francisco. Today fracking is getting a lot of the credit for that big earthquake and so I will not go on and discuss it anymore beyond that and just hope the best for my neighbors and friends down in Oklahoma.
When December rolled around it was the two-hundred year anniversary of the Great New Madrid Earthquake, or series of earthquakes I suppose you could say. December 16, 1811 was actually the date of the first in that series while the other major ones that followed were on January 23, and February 7 of 1812. Somewhere along the way I found those earthquakes were preceded by severe winter conditions on the East Coast. Something I will do more research into at a later date.
They had a regular stage show in Downtown New Madrid, Missouri at the Dixie Theater featuring an interview with the lady who wrote a complete journal of all the events of that earthquake. So I drove down to New Madrid to see all of it in person and stayed nearby at Marston which just so happened to have been the epicenter of one of those in the series of earthquakes. Also made it out to the portion of Tennessee that is out on the Peninsula there across the Mississippi River from New Madrid to visit the towns of Tiptonville, and Ridgely also two towns that get a lot of earthquakes. I also cruised over and checked out Reelfoot Lake which was a part of the Mississippi River that was very much involved in that series of earthquakes. A stop to visit Hillbilly Junction and I was on my way. I think I took a quick windshield tour of Dyersburg, too, before I left. Still as of this writing want to make another trip down that way because I missed Blytheville, Arkansas, and Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and I’ve heard I should see Vicksburg, Mississippi, too. CITATION: Wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_earthquake
As long as I seem to be doing a fairly good job of Bringing Earthquakes To Life, I’ll just continue on to a story that actually got started in late 2009, a few years before the anniversary of New Madrid, yet! I know I discussed some of this already in the severe winter conditions story but 2009 got sort of an early start as far as the arrival of Winter was concerned and by December 22 of that year what I like to call severe winter conditions were covering practically the whole country.
December 22, 2009 was the date I wrote all up and filed “Official Prediction for a Major Earthquake to Strike California before January 12, 2010.” I was watching something on the television on the early evening of January 9, 2010 when my phone chimed with the latest earthquake information. I was so shocked when I flipped my phone open to see what it was that I can hardly breathe even now as I write it! Couldn’t believe that it said there had just been a 6.5 Richters Earthquake at Eureka, California at 6:37pm Central Time! I did not happen to have the computer on at the time and couldn’t get up out of that chair fast enough to rush over and turn it on.
There was a lot of stuff already on there including my EQ Twitter being practically overloaded with “At Messages” telling me I had said Eureka would be getting a Major Earthquake.
On the final day of that Official Prediction that I filed back on December 22, 2009 at around 4pm on the afternoon of January 12, 2010 was the exact moment that the Haiti Earthquake struck. This was all, in my opinion, due to the same identical movement of the North American Tectonic Plate with Eureka, California situated up in the northwest corner and Haiti situated all the way down in the opposite corner to the southeast. Somewhere along the way I was even asked what I thought about aftershocks of the Eureka Earthquake and I said that I considered it the movement of the North American Tectonic Plate and that Haiti was in the opposite corner, down there in those Caribbean Islands.
I guess I had also been thinking of all the rain they had gotten over the last year or so and in the back of my mind was calculating the factor that a lot of rain plays in possibly loosening some of the fault lines situated out in the Haiti region between the tectonic plates.
Of course it’s not at all new that I had said the name of a place where a major earthquake struck before it struck there so I don’t really feel the need to go on into any more details there with that. Especially since I have not actually found anywhere that I mention Haiti in any of my EQ Blogs or anything from the hours and days following the Eureka 2010 Earthquake.
I must have immediately went on to quickly also file “Official Prediction For Another Major Earthquake,” dated January 13, 2010 thinking it was necessary due to the immediate threat of a major aftershock, although I do not think there were any additional major aftershocks in this series.
When I finally arrived home from Quake Chase 2011, I found that there had been an error in my bank account and immediately called their 800 number. Well, I was able to get my balance fixed by transferring the funds, but was not able to deal with all the charges that accrued throughout that error process.
You see I deposited a check and in order to use it with my check card it would have needed to go into my checking account which was my first question I asked the lady a couple days later when I went to my local Bank of America in McHenry, Ill on Monday. Immediately upon my arrival there I requested a copy of the original deposit slip and while I waited Hugo Mercado entered the lobby to say hello, like practically all bank managers have been doing these days. Of course I greeted the dude, but wasted no time explaining what had happened to my account while I was out chasing earthquakes.
As the teller returned with a copy she printed out of my original deposit slip, Hugo was mentioning that him and his family had just been in one of the recent Illinois Earthquakes. Luckily I noticed right at that instant that I had circled checking on my original deposit slip and asked Hugo which of the Illinois earthquakes that would have been and continued telling him “By the way that is one method I use to predict or forecast these is by taking the one which struck Ottawa, Illinois and the one that struck. . .” where I had to stop and think before telling him that the recent one was a year earlier in March of 2010 near Elgin, Illinois.
We were headed for his office to figure out how many charges needed to be refunded when I told him that both of those cities were on the Fox River and one way that I track earthquake energy is along a river such as the Fox River in this situation. So I went on to tell him the next town along the Fox River was Downtown McHenry, Illinois and that there could be an earthquake there around February 2012. Of course he had to ask if I meant a huge earthquake and I said, “No,” probably just another Illinois style earthquake of around 3 or 4 Richters or so.” Although banks being what they are, especially that one, they certainly have all of that on video somewhere.
Before we were all done there that day he ultimately had to make a call to California to reverse the transfer fees and I was paid back the sum of forty dollars to my account. The story about that earthquake ended when on January 30, 2012 a 2.4 Richters earthquake actually struck McHenry, Illinois just two miles south of that downtown I had told Hugo about back in November of 2011.
I still see Hugo from time to time including the time I had to run him down for a newspaper story one day and get a photograph of that Bank of America branch in McHenry, Illinois where we were definitely there Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
What looks like it might be my last good earthquake story in this original version of Bringing Earthquakes To Life started with the landfall at Queensland, Australia of Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi on February 2, 2011. Winds had been reported as high as 340 Kilometers Per Hour prior to that landfall and I knew there would be a whole lot of brand new Major Earthquake energy coming!
By now you probably know the next thing that I do is check on my globe to see where exactly all this new earthquake energy will be headed. I immediately started to write down the names of all the islands offshore from Queensland that lie out in the Pacific. Kiribati, Tuvalu, and then I noticed New Zealand. Well Christchurch did just have a 7.1 Richters shaker a year earlier on September 4, 2010, so I wrote the name of that town down, too. Those islands actually became a headline in my next EQ Blog entry as well as fit neatly into a “Tweet” or Twitter message on my EQ Twitter Page.
Today both of those are now fairly famous due to Christchurch getting a Major Earthquake of 6.3 Richters 20 days later on February 22, 2011.
There was an enormous amount of damage and a large number of deaths at Christchurch, but for some reason I was not convinced that it was the end of all of the new Major Earthquake energy from the landfall of Cyclone Yasi. For one thing I reasoned that due to the direction the storm was moving at landfall, the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate was actually moving the other direction and actually away from New Zealand. This meant the really big tectonic plate collision would be up around the Himalayan Arc somewhere such as Indonesia and in at least one EQ Blog entry I even mentioned Japan and Taiwan and said tsunami, too.
“Grand Finale” were the words I used apologizing for using a term that describes the closing act of a circus. Having said it several times that the Grand Finale was probably yet to come, I was not totally surprised when late one night I was checking the latest earthquakes just before I went to bed and “JAPAN 9.0 RICHTERS” was in red letters at the top of the list! I immediately turned on the TV just in time to catch the live footage of the tsunami washing ashore near Sendi.
There might be other stories since that day as far as earthquake stories are concerned, but they certainly will never have names such as Yasi and Japan 2011 or Christchurch. The only great story I could find from 2012 was a Lau/Sumatra and I do not even recall either of those and the 2012 Sumatra Earthquake looks like it was 8 Magnitude following Lau’s landfall at Australia.
So, I intend to finish out this volume with mostly my remaining stories about all the movie stuff that has happened in 2012 and 2013 including how I got my Screen Actors Guild card!
A good place to start might be the day I was cast to work in the latest Ron Howard movie shooting in Chicago under the working title What You Don‘t Know, and is now titled The Dilemma.
I was cast to work in a bar fight scene where there was a lot of stunt men and they were breaking a lot of bottles and there was a lot of broken glass flying everywhere. It was my job to grab my girl and hustle her out of the way into a corner somewhere away from all of the fighting.
We did many, many takes of that scene and there was tons of glass flying that day and I ate tons of those pretzels off the bar and drank a lot of soda pop that day, too. You see I had to, I was a customer at the bar for the first several moments of every take and so a drink of my pop and a couple of pretzels was my best acting bit! After a few takes I think they added the part where one of the guys turns and punches the camera right square in the lens and that ends the scene. When Vince Vaughn says he was in a bar fight in that movie you will see that scene, too. Maybe me far off to the right in a wide screen version, but I’ve only ever seen it in the theaters and did not see myself in that particular scene, mostly only the part where the guy punches the camera.
Chicago Film Production being what it is there was a huge scene yet to shoot for this movie that was still at that time doing all their casting under a “Working Title.” They needed a few hundred people for several days of filming at the United Center in Chicago, and so I called and asked if I could repeat due to having worked in that bar fight scene. Actually I might have made this contact by way of this casting company having recently gone to a Facebook page. They messaged me back that I could work the crowd scene, which I know sometimes you can get away with doing. I was immediately booked to work like three days and was headed off to Chicago for my latest big film production shoot!
The first scenes we shot were all of the scenes from the ending of that movie which I will not discuss in order to avoid giving away how it ends. I will say about one whole entire day we spent just basically being the crowd that cheers for what the two stars, Kevin James and Vince Vaughn are doing right at the end of the movie which you will have to see because out of courtesy I do not want to tell about.
At some point we were all ushered up to the second level where our next scene was the one that appeared in all of the previews for this movie. That would be the scene where Kevin James gets up from his seat in the 200 section and announces that they are on the Jumbotron! Then he proceeds to do all of his dancing with me in the row right behind him and it’s only another moment before all of us are up and basically doing the same dance to the Chicago Blackhawks theme song, “Chelsea Dagger.” For quite some time I was seen in that preview including in the theaters and got a nice snapshot off a preview that was showing somewhere on the internet and took it and showed it to all of my friends, too!
There were even apparently enough scenes with the Chicago Blackhawks Ice Crew, hockey’s version of a spirit squad/cheerleaders on ice skates, that I recognized a couple of them, Paige and Jenna, in the recent Stanley Cup Parade through Downtown Chicago after they won the Stanley Cup in June of 2013. The girls from the Ice Crew were among all the rest of the team riding on the top of those double-decker busses in that big parade, there through Downtown Chicago. I took the Metra Train to Downtown Chicago from the Random Lake Beach Metra Station to see that parade that day and had a great trip and got a lot of great pictures including those of my first glimpse of the Stanley Cup, too!
The story about that movie that I worked on at the United Center where I also had worked with the girls of the Ice Crew, how it ended was when on the last day of the shoot Jon, who I know I introduced earlier from Atmo Casting, came out and looked around at the crowd and then grabbed me and I was instantly upgraded to my brand new job of a “Guest Services Person” and went all through the wardrobe and hair routine all over again. Now it was also Jon who upgraded me a year or so earlier on a job called Pleading Guilty which I will detail in a moment after I’m all through with The Dilemma.
My time spent working as a Guest Services Person amounted to a long shot of me standing in a portal at the top of the lower section at an entrance to the mezzanine and it was an awesome roll to be playing and while it felt fun being a Guest Services Person, it didn’t go on my resume albeit a nice wardrobe of long sleeve blue dress shirt and bright red vest! I did get to meet Ron Howard at one point, though, and said, “Excuse Me” as I walked past him, there, noticing I’m kind of taller than Opie is today!
When I arrived at the location for this next movie I pulled in the parking lot and showed the Security Guy that I had my window thing already all nicely made-up. It said Matadors and probably the name of the casting company. The Security Guy replied to me with how nice the sign was that I had all made up and it proved I did all my studying prior to the days shoot, too, including having looked up all the main actors and what shows they had worked on. He said, “Very nice. . . except this is Pleading Guilty.”
Long story short the guy I was looking forward to working with that day would not be there, instead I spent all day working with a guy wearing a “Bones” jacket. It was the other day I was talking about earlier when Jon upgraded me, this time to a Stand-In and when I got home I looked up the guy with the “Bones” jacket. He turned out to be Hart Hansen the producer of this new pilot for a TV series we were working on and currently also the producer for the TV series, “Bones.”
The scene we were shooting consisted of a lawyer who was talking to somebody at a skate park and we were surrounded by guys who were experts on skateboards who were from Los Angeles. As a Stand-In I took the lawyers position while they set up each and every shot and it was my turn to be surrounded by those experts flying high above my head in every scene that we set up while I worked that day as the B-Team.
Eventually I would combine those two great upgrades that I received both from Jon, towards getting my S. A. G. card, but the best part of the Pleading Guilty job is yet to come! When it came time to check-out, I found myself standing in line with not only other actors and some guys with skateboards, but there were a few guys standing there with me carrying Rollerblades/inline skates. That was the moment when it occurred to me that Rollerblading or Inline skating, might be fun and I could not wait to get back home to Wisconsin and get me a brand new pair of Rollerblades to try out for myself!
As of this writing I am now up to about my fourth pair of Rollerblades on top of many, many new sets of wheels and an assortment of different new bearings that I have put on them since that day on the set of Pleading Guilty when I discovered inline skating! The best set of bearings that I have found up to this point being the ABEC-9 Bearings that I am currently running on. The year 2013 is now like my forth summer of inline skating and I even have now officially retired that very first pair that I bought the next day after that shoot, and that accompanied me on my Quake Chase 2011 and now have them set aside to go in the “EQ Guy Museum” someday.
Unfortunately Pleading Guilty was never picked up and never went on to be a major TV series that shot in Chicago. One that we worked on more recently DID, though. A pilot called Betrayal was shooting scenes at the Illinois Railway Museum outside of Marengo, Illinois in the Spring of 2013 and I was lucky enough to get called to work there on this great new ABC-TV Series that has since been picked up and I worked on it again yesterday as I write this on July 31, 2013.
At the Illinois Railway Museum someone was arriving at a station and we pretty much just walked back and forth looking like people who might actually be at a railroad station in real life, you know. Until we were all done shooting exteriors and they asked which of us were never seen by the camera all day, because a lot of them were. I hadn’t been since I was holding inside their Railroad Depot there and just watching for a lot of the day and as a result I was chosen to stick around into the evening and got to work with two of the stars of the show inside of a railroad car in the museums railroad yard.
As of this writing I have not seen that pilot episode so I do not know if you can see me in it. I can tell you I had a great seat facing the two actors until one of the Assistant Directors decided I should turn around and be seated with my back to the camera instead. It had by then been a fairly long day so I turned around and we shot a lot of scenes with the back of my head facing the camera.
The Illinois Railway museum is located like halfway between Chicago and Rockford, Illinois and there have been a lot of movies shot there over the years. Probably my all time favorite is League of Their Own. Where the most famous scene shot there was the one where Lori Petty and Gina Davis chase the train, throw their bags onto it, and jump on. One of the volunteers there on the day of the shoot also reminded me of the series of scenes where the train then makes a lot of different stops in different towns where the depot and platform were simply decorated differently for each take to make it look like the train was stopping in a different town!
Betrayal was a success! The TV series was picked up by the ABC-TV network and as of late July 2013 is now back in Chicago shooting the first episode and probably more. I know because late on Monday Night this week I received an E-Mail to work on the show Tuesday, July 30, 2013 and got up very early, like 3:55am, and drove down to Downtown Chicago where we shot scenes along the streets of downtown all day! Including one particular scene where they directed me to do one of those famous shots where I got to walk in between the star and the camera and got a huge Close-Up! Time will tell if that great Close-Up of me makes the final cut of that episode, but for today you could say it feels just like my best day of Chicago Film Production ever!
Prior to yesterdays great shoot, my best had been a day when I was cast as a “Mobster Mourner.” Wearing a very nice all black outfit I was cast to be a mourner at the wake of the father of the main character in the show. In that scene three of us discussed what we should do about the guys who killed him in a rather animated scene with no sound. I carefully watched ever so closely through the end of the series Mob Doctor all the way to the very end of the last episode to see if we were in it and never seen us. No trace of the scene, nor of the wake at all. That show was long ago canceled, too.
Luckily I worked on yet another great show late last year, and early this year, called Chicago Fire and got a great Close-Up in an episode of that show. I was cast as an “Orderly” and wardrobed all up in a scrub suit to work at the Nursing Station where the two paramedics come in with a gurney.
I was directed to walk past the counter and grab a couple little items such as gauze and exit. When it came time to shoot, it turned out the two paramedics entered from a door right near where I was told to walk and I now had to walk past them to get behind the counter at the nurses station. Well the camera would be right there in my face again and there is today a great Close-Up of me in that episode from season one. Chicago Fire was picked up for a second season and while they did just cast for the next hospital scene, they never called me so it doesn’t look like I’ll be seen on that show playing an “Orderly” again anytime soon.
There was one other big show that I worked on not long ago, too. Kelsey Grammer was playing the Mayor of Chicago in a TV series titled BOSS. Great day of work and a pleasant part of town just to the north of downtown, although I was nowhere near where Kelsey Grammer got out of his car and walked into whatever building he was heading to that day. I drove my car in a few of the scenes, and actually saw his limo in my rear view mirror a few times, too, but no Kelsey Grammer. Additionally I was reunited with a girl I had been working with since the beginning of my days in Chicago Film Production, Traci Lewis. We had a moment where we quickly established a long friendship and it was great working with her that day.
Looking at Traci’s resume on IMDB would probably be very similar to my own list of projects right up to the end of the 1990’s. Probably the most famous was my very first big movie job, which was also established at some point one day to have also been her first movie titled Cold Justice. Having started out as a Casting Assistant and a Production Assistant, Traci works these days as a Second Assistant Director, and has been right there working in the Chicago Film Production biz the same as me for all of those years, too! Although I worked a lot in Hollywood and Traci has worked a lot of different places around the country and the world, too.
In the summer of 2008 there might not have been quite so much film production work happening and so I also did some work in those days as an Event Security person and worked on a lot of shows such as the big Maroon 5, Kid Rock, Lady Antebellum concert up at Lambeau Field in Green Bay back in 2011, as well as an Elton John concert and many other such jobs and my Grand Finale was “Umphree’s McGee at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee where I worked with that band for 3 whole nights!
That is all of the latest stuff that The EQ Guy does when he is not tracking earthquakes. My primary work, though, throughout the majority of all of those most recent years has been to track every single major windstorm, and etc. and write all up in my EQ Blog and on my EQ Twitter with all about when and where the next major earthquake might strike.
As of the Summer of 2013 the process of writing in my EQ Blog on a daily basis and then posting it at my EQ Twitter and EQ Guy Facebook page is a great system that is working well for me. I have thousands of readers, as well as thousands of followers on my EQ Twitter and am now officially getting paid for all of my work over all of those years. For the foreseeable future it looks like that is the system I will continue to use and I want to personally thank everybody who follows me or stops by and checks out the very latest in what’s happening with earthquakes all around the world. I am also presently putting together a one-hour radio show, too, and am presently checking into getting some audio clips that I want to use. That show will air September 30, 2013 on my local Back Porch Radio Station WORT-FM 89.9 in Madison, Wisconsin on their “Access Hour.” I am calling my show “The EQ Radio Show” and have thought about using the name of this book, or “Bringing Earthquakes To The Radio.”
That is pretty much the whole entire story of all that I have put into the business of tracking earthquakes all around the world as well as researching them for twenty years, now! It has been quite a lot of hard work and even actually a certain amount of work that had to be done sometimes when I had better things that I wanted to be out doing instead!
There have been a lot of successes on the road to where I am today and I hope there will be a lot more in the future! There is still a lot more research to be done and there are yet a lot more EQ Blogs to write as I continue on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life!!!
THE END
A typhoon was coming up through the South China Sea one day in late September of 2011 when I started to notice it was headed right for the South of Japan. This particular direction of travel always gets my attention because if it is a direct hit at the South of Japan from the direction of the South China Sea it can mean a Major Earthquake might be heading directly for California. Well, that turned out to be exactly what Typhoon Roke did, too.
I tracked the new earthquake energy from the landfall of Typhoon Roke with my globe and straight line tool the best I could knowing it looked like it would soon be intersecting the lives of a lot of folks on the West Coast of the U.S. and the line went straight through Southern Oregon right where it shares a border with Northern California.
I began posting the information immediately as soon as I knew something was headed directly for Northern California like that. There had been several prior to this and some of my best ones, actually included one where the two readers had written me back thanking me which I discussed a while back in this book.
It wasn’t the first one that had looked so certain as this one did, and wasn’t the first time it had occurred to me to head to the city or region where a Major Earthquake was about to strike. The thought of going on a “Quake Chase” had occurred to me on a number of occasions before, and then someone left a comment on one of those EQ Blog entries in which I discussed this prediction. Someone pointed out that the October 2011 Full Moon would fall on October 12. Well, October 12 just so happened to also be Day 21 after the landfall of Typhoon Roke and I was immediately convinced it would surely be the day of this earthquake at Northern California or Southern Oregon around the region of Eureka, California, and Coos Bay, Oregon!
I was discussing driving out there in a chat room with some of my friends from around my hometown when one of them said it might be easier or cheaper to fly.
I checked and found it rather cheap to fly from Chicago to San Francisco and so I immediately bought a ticket to fly out there on October 11, the day before the October 2011 Full Moon.
I told the lady at the El Camino Motel on Mission Street that I wanted an upstairs room incase the earthquake flattened the building I didn’t want to be underneath it. I had originally wanted to rent a car and drive it up to Eureka, but looked at Eureka on Google Earth and it is almost right at sea level and would be a huge problem if too big of a tsunami resulted in the event the earthquake did actually strike and was too huge. I was also not sure how I would explain to the rent-a-car folks that I sustained a lot of damage in an earthquake that I knew was supposed to happen and that was a whole entire thing I didn’t want to get involved in, too! Finally there was also the problem of what to do if the earthquake strikes in San Francisco while I’m up in Eureka and it is so big that I then have difficulty getting back into the city, to the airport, and to return the car, etc. Not being all that familiar with the highways around that city could have made that very difficult in a Major Earthquake.
That was when I began looking up hotels close to SFO, the name of the San Francisco Airport. I decided I could go everywhere I needed to go on the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or B.A.R.T.
That was exactly what I did the minute I arrived was take B.A.R.T. from Colma station which was actually closer to my motel than the Daly City Station also nearby, to Millbrae where I caught the Cal-Train to Palo Alto actually closer to where I was going than the actual Menlo Park Station and with a better route for rollerblading/inline skating, too.
Upon arriving at the Palo Alto Station, I detrained from my Cal-Train, put my rollerblades on, and headed down Middlefield Road to the offices of the United States Geological Survey or USGS. There I found among other things the worlds largest typographical map store where I spent a moment looking around and eventually bought the one that included all the typography around my motel on Mission Street. Then it was on to find any of the offices of the USGS people I had on my prepared list. I went down the directory and compared all the names I had written down to all the names on their directory at the front of the building by the room where they have all the seismographs on display there.
The only name I recall finding was Jeanne Hardebeck and so I headed down the hall to her office carrying my rollerblades in the handbag that I carried with me along with my Quake Chase Nikes that I carried in my little stringy backpack thing along with that handbag for my Rollerblades when I wasn’t wearing them.
I hand delivered a printed out copy of the Official Prediction for Eureka, California to Jeanne Hardebeck who just so happened at the time to also be on the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, she no longer is, and it wasn’t long before I was out the door there putting my Rollerblades back on and heading to my next stop on the San Francisco road towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
So I pull my rollerblades out of my handbag along with my string backpack and put the rollerblades on and throw the shoes in the string bag and my next stop is the 711 across the street from the Palo Alto Cal-Train Station for an ice cold Slurpie! Then upon exiting Cal-Train at Millbrae Station, I take a quick side trip up to see the very beautiful San Andreas Lake and check out the San Andreas Trail which turned out not to be paved so no Rollerblading up there, although it will be a great trail for hiking for me on some later trip up that way. I had actually even seen the region once before during my time in L.A. having driven past it on one of my trips to the San Francisco area.
Got a beautiful shot of San Francisco Bay from the top of Millbrae Avenue there as I headed back down for the B.A.R.T. Station. With a couple of tall palm trees in the shot you can see the bay with the mountains in the background.
The next day was the day and night of the October 2011 Full Moon, although since then I have begun narrowing the full and new moons down to the exact moment and adding twenty-four hours before and after them to create what I call the Full or New Moon Window. Back in October of 2011 the full moon was October 12 and that was probably all there was to it. I was up early on the 12th and caught the express B.A.R.T train to Berkeley where I went to visit my old friend Professor Richard Allen of UC Berkeley and formerly from Seismology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You might remember when I visited him at the Geology Building in Madison and he told me to file with CEPEC, and NEPEC and also inspired me to track earthquakes all around the world. That was also where I discovered that big giant globe out front of the Geology Museum there and discovered how to use it to track earthquakes much more accurately.
Professor Allen was very glad to see me again and on this occasion he was very happy to show me the latest in Earthquake Early Warning software right there on his computer monitor. As he was showing it to me right at that moment it suddenly began to beep, buzz, ring, howl and squawk quite noisily right there before my eyes with an earthquake that had just struck around the border with Mexico. It then proceeded to begin counting down the number of seconds before the earthquake energy would be felt in his office and while it counted down the seconds, it also said it wouldn’t be felt there at his office where we were at inside McCone Hall at UC Berkeley. Although I clearly felt the slightest rumbling under my feet at the moment when it counted off to zero, and knew it was probably the earthquake energy from that one that just got done making the warning alarm howl.
Just then another one struck somewhere else around the Southern California area and it went through its whole routine all over again.
Our wonderful visit that day ended with the conversation about the L’Aquila Italy Seismologists matter. That was where Giampaolo Giuliani accurately predicted there would be a Major Earthquake at L’Aquila, Italy and had many people evacuated due to the elevated radon readings he had been getting in the area. Somewhere along the way the mayor disagreed with Giuliani and formed a committee of seismologists who determined there was no reason for concern and sent all the people back into their homes. Giuliani was allowed to keep his own family out and when an earthquake struck there a few days later 297 people died and Giuliani and his family survived.
Not too long afterwards the public conscience demanded the seismologists on that committee be charged with manslaughter and a trial was scheduled. This was where I took a couple of steps towards the door of Professor Allens office due to him being one of the first signatures that I saw on the petition to let the scientists go or whatever. Of course I was exuberant that they were standing trial with everything to GAIN by Earthquake Prediction going on trial over in Italy, but certainly controlled that excitement at this point, you understand. I simply took a few more steps towards the door there and at right about that point told Professor Allen that I didn’t want to take any more of his time and obviously had a lot of other stuff to do around Frisco. Although I might have briefly explained my position to him that I was happy to see the world was finally listening to some facts about earthquake prediction while at the same time very sorry it had to be at the hands of a “Heavy Handed” government and how sorry I was for his friends being chastised, some of whom I think the professor mentioned knowing personally although I did not get all those details. It made for a nice discussion with my old friend whom I originally met that day back in Wisconsin around the year 2002 when he was on the TV talking about a much earlier version of that same system.
That was the point where we shook hands and I then departed the office of my now old friend who I will surely meet up with again someday in the business of earthquakes, and seismology and who himself has been an enormous help to me on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
My next stop on the Bay Area Rapid Transit was Beautiful Downtown Hayward, California where I again put my Rollerblades on and took a real nice tour through all of their downtown including a lot of what looked to be the Hayward Fault. Then a stop at the Lucky Store for some chicken wings for my lunch and back on the B.A.R.T. to the San Francisco Zoo.
At the San Francisco Zoo I found the animals only mildly rowdy and not really seeming to be saying too big of an earthquake was just hours away as they should have been. This lead me to think smaller like 5.9 Richters Earthquake although I did not bother sending any such message out to my EQ Twitter from there and ironically if I had it would have been exactly right. Across the street from the zoo was the very beautiful Pacific Ocean where I jumped in and went for a long awaited swim. Next throwing my Rollerblades back on and heading up to San Francisco State University where I would catch the number 220 bus back to Colma B.A.R.T. Station.
The earthquake I had traveled out there for struck later that night at 8:15pm while I was crossing the street to the 711 for an ice cream cone that night. It gave one violent shake and several big aftershocks as I was crossing the street in the crosswalk and nearly threw me back across from south to north when it hit. The initial shock was a 5.9 that was later downgraded to a 5.3 and is still to this day by far one of the biggest Major Earthquakes to ever hit that area. The epicenter was just offshore from Coos Bay, Oregon just a few miles from Eureka, California as I had stated in the banner headline of the Official Prediction that I hand delivered to CEPEC immediately upon my arrival in San Francisco.
With the remaining days on my trip I visited Haight-Ashbury, and Golden Gate Park for some Rollerblading and took the boat out to Alcatraz. On Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 2:30 in the afternoon I was on my plane flying out of SFO to the tune of a song by a band called “Train” titled Save Me San Francisco. Coincidentally the last time I knew that was how the script for my movie “EQ Alert: The Movie” ended, too. Maybe as of the last time I updated it anyways. I’m sure it will be updated again before it gets made. . . maybe not. I was also thinking about including some of the scenes here in this volume, until it occurred to me that including that final scene would give away how that movie ends. It also occurred to me that maybe I should change the name of that movie to Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
You might think something like overnight becoming the Worlds First Official Quake Chaser would be a really big thing or that there could really be some media coverage to follow what I did. Well, I did get one story about my trip printed and am happy about that although I was a little disappointed that the Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t have a category for Earthquake Prediction, nor probably for Quake Chasing, either.
Just the same being on the front page was easily one of the biggest days of my life and I want to thank all of the people involved in making that become a reality, too.
The earthquake energy from the landfall of Typhoon Roke crossed California and while they did have a 5.9 the night of the full moon while I was out there, they got two more that appeared to have struck like directly under the city of Berkeley that week in the 4 Magnitude Range. That would not be the end of it, though, since the energy would continue on and cross Oklahoma where they got a 5.6 earthquake a few more days after I got home from San Francisco. Today fracking is getting a lot of the credit for that big earthquake and so I will not go on and discuss it anymore beyond that and just hope the best for my neighbors and friends down in Oklahoma.
When December rolled around it was the two-hundred year anniversary of the Great New Madrid Earthquake, or series of earthquakes I suppose you could say. December 16, 1811 was actually the date of the first in that series while the other major ones that followed were on January 23, and February 7 of 1812. Somewhere along the way I found those earthquakes were preceded by severe winter conditions on the East Coast. Something I will do more research into at a later date.
They had a regular stage show in Downtown New Madrid, Missouri at the Dixie Theater featuring an interview with the lady who wrote a complete journal of all the events of that earthquake. So I drove down to New Madrid to see all of it in person and stayed nearby at Marston which just so happened to have been the epicenter of one of those in the series of earthquakes. Also made it out to the portion of Tennessee that is out on the Peninsula there across the Mississippi River from New Madrid to visit the towns of Tiptonville, and Ridgely also two towns that get a lot of earthquakes. I also cruised over and checked out Reelfoot Lake which was a part of the Mississippi River that was very much involved in that series of earthquakes. A stop to visit Hillbilly Junction and I was on my way. I think I took a quick windshield tour of Dyersburg, too, before I left. Still as of this writing want to make another trip down that way because I missed Blytheville, Arkansas, and Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and I’ve heard I should see Vicksburg, Mississippi, too. CITATION: Wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_earthquake
As long as I seem to be doing a fairly good job of Bringing Earthquakes To Life, I’ll just continue on to a story that actually got started in late 2009, a few years before the anniversary of New Madrid, yet! I know I discussed some of this already in the severe winter conditions story but 2009 got sort of an early start as far as the arrival of Winter was concerned and by December 22 of that year what I like to call severe winter conditions were covering practically the whole country.
December 22, 2009 was the date I wrote all up and filed “Official Prediction for a Major Earthquake to Strike California before January 12, 2010.” I was watching something on the television on the early evening of January 9, 2010 when my phone chimed with the latest earthquake information. I was so shocked when I flipped my phone open to see what it was that I can hardly breathe even now as I write it! Couldn’t believe that it said there had just been a 6.5 Richters Earthquake at Eureka, California at 6:37pm Central Time! I did not happen to have the computer on at the time and couldn’t get up out of that chair fast enough to rush over and turn it on.
There was a lot of stuff already on there including my EQ Twitter being practically overloaded with “At Messages” telling me I had said Eureka would be getting a Major Earthquake.
On the final day of that Official Prediction that I filed back on December 22, 2009 at around 4pm on the afternoon of January 12, 2010 was the exact moment that the Haiti Earthquake struck. This was all, in my opinion, due to the same identical movement of the North American Tectonic Plate with Eureka, California situated up in the northwest corner and Haiti situated all the way down in the opposite corner to the southeast. Somewhere along the way I was even asked what I thought about aftershocks of the Eureka Earthquake and I said that I considered it the movement of the North American Tectonic Plate and that Haiti was in the opposite corner, down there in those Caribbean Islands.
I guess I had also been thinking of all the rain they had gotten over the last year or so and in the back of my mind was calculating the factor that a lot of rain plays in possibly loosening some of the fault lines situated out in the Haiti region between the tectonic plates.
Of course it’s not at all new that I had said the name of a place where a major earthquake struck before it struck there so I don’t really feel the need to go on into any more details there with that. Especially since I have not actually found anywhere that I mention Haiti in any of my EQ Blogs or anything from the hours and days following the Eureka 2010 Earthquake.
I must have immediately went on to quickly also file “Official Prediction For Another Major Earthquake,” dated January 13, 2010 thinking it was necessary due to the immediate threat of a major aftershock, although I do not think there were any additional major aftershocks in this series.
When I finally arrived home from Quake Chase 2011, I found that there had been an error in my bank account and immediately called their 800 number. Well, I was able to get my balance fixed by transferring the funds, but was not able to deal with all the charges that accrued throughout that error process.
You see I deposited a check and in order to use it with my check card it would have needed to go into my checking account which was my first question I asked the lady a couple days later when I went to my local Bank of America in McHenry, Ill on Monday. Immediately upon my arrival there I requested a copy of the original deposit slip and while I waited Hugo Mercado entered the lobby to say hello, like practically all bank managers have been doing these days. Of course I greeted the dude, but wasted no time explaining what had happened to my account while I was out chasing earthquakes.
As the teller returned with a copy she printed out of my original deposit slip, Hugo was mentioning that him and his family had just been in one of the recent Illinois Earthquakes. Luckily I noticed right at that instant that I had circled checking on my original deposit slip and asked Hugo which of the Illinois earthquakes that would have been and continued telling him “By the way that is one method I use to predict or forecast these is by taking the one which struck Ottawa, Illinois and the one that struck. . .” where I had to stop and think before telling him that the recent one was a year earlier in March of 2010 near Elgin, Illinois.
We were headed for his office to figure out how many charges needed to be refunded when I told him that both of those cities were on the Fox River and one way that I track earthquake energy is along a river such as the Fox River in this situation. So I went on to tell him the next town along the Fox River was Downtown McHenry, Illinois and that there could be an earthquake there around February 2012. Of course he had to ask if I meant a huge earthquake and I said, “No,” probably just another Illinois style earthquake of around 3 or 4 Richters or so.” Although banks being what they are, especially that one, they certainly have all of that on video somewhere.
Before we were all done there that day he ultimately had to make a call to California to reverse the transfer fees and I was paid back the sum of forty dollars to my account. The story about that earthquake ended when on January 30, 2012 a 2.4 Richters earthquake actually struck McHenry, Illinois just two miles south of that downtown I had told Hugo about back in November of 2011.
I still see Hugo from time to time including the time I had to run him down for a newspaper story one day and get a photograph of that Bank of America branch in McHenry, Illinois where we were definitely there Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
What looks like it might be my last good earthquake story in this original version of Bringing Earthquakes To Life started with the landfall at Queensland, Australia of Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi on February 2, 2011. Winds had been reported as high as 340 Kilometers Per Hour prior to that landfall and I knew there would be a whole lot of brand new Major Earthquake energy coming!
By now you probably know the next thing that I do is check on my globe to see where exactly all this new earthquake energy will be headed. I immediately started to write down the names of all the islands offshore from Queensland that lie out in the Pacific. Kiribati, Tuvalu, and then I noticed New Zealand. Well Christchurch did just have a 7.1 Richters shaker a year earlier on September 4, 2010, so I wrote the name of that town down, too. Those islands actually became a headline in my next EQ Blog entry as well as fit neatly into a “Tweet” or Twitter message on my EQ Twitter Page.
Today both of those are now fairly famous due to Christchurch getting a Major Earthquake of 6.3 Richters 20 days later on February 22, 2011.
There was an enormous amount of damage and a large number of deaths at Christchurch, but for some reason I was not convinced that it was the end of all of the new Major Earthquake energy from the landfall of Cyclone Yasi. For one thing I reasoned that due to the direction the storm was moving at landfall, the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate was actually moving the other direction and actually away from New Zealand. This meant the really big tectonic plate collision would be up around the Himalayan Arc somewhere such as Indonesia and in at least one EQ Blog entry I even mentioned Japan and Taiwan and said tsunami, too.
“Grand Finale” were the words I used apologizing for using a term that describes the closing act of a circus. Having said it several times that the Grand Finale was probably yet to come, I was not totally surprised when late one night I was checking the latest earthquakes just before I went to bed and “JAPAN 9.0 RICHTERS” was in red letters at the top of the list! I immediately turned on the TV just in time to catch the live footage of the tsunami washing ashore near Sendi.
There might be other stories since that day as far as earthquake stories are concerned, but they certainly will never have names such as Yasi and Japan 2011 or Christchurch. The only great story I could find from 2012 was a Lau/Sumatra and I do not even recall either of those and the 2012 Sumatra Earthquake looks like it was 8 Magnitude following Lau’s landfall at Australia.
So, I intend to finish out this volume with mostly my remaining stories about all the movie stuff that has happened in 2012 and 2013 including how I got my Screen Actors Guild card!
A good place to start might be the day I was cast to work in the latest Ron Howard movie shooting in Chicago under the working title What You Don‘t Know, and is now titled The Dilemma.
I was cast to work in a bar fight scene where there was a lot of stunt men and they were breaking a lot of bottles and there was a lot of broken glass flying everywhere. It was my job to grab my girl and hustle her out of the way into a corner somewhere away from all of the fighting.
We did many, many takes of that scene and there was tons of glass flying that day and I ate tons of those pretzels off the bar and drank a lot of soda pop that day, too. You see I had to, I was a customer at the bar for the first several moments of every take and so a drink of my pop and a couple of pretzels was my best acting bit! After a few takes I think they added the part where one of the guys turns and punches the camera right square in the lens and that ends the scene. When Vince Vaughn says he was in a bar fight in that movie you will see that scene, too. Maybe me far off to the right in a wide screen version, but I’ve only ever seen it in the theaters and did not see myself in that particular scene, mostly only the part where the guy punches the camera.
Chicago Film Production being what it is there was a huge scene yet to shoot for this movie that was still at that time doing all their casting under a “Working Title.” They needed a few hundred people for several days of filming at the United Center in Chicago, and so I called and asked if I could repeat due to having worked in that bar fight scene. Actually I might have made this contact by way of this casting company having recently gone to a Facebook page. They messaged me back that I could work the crowd scene, which I know sometimes you can get away with doing. I was immediately booked to work like three days and was headed off to Chicago for my latest big film production shoot!
The first scenes we shot were all of the scenes from the ending of that movie which I will not discuss in order to avoid giving away how it ends. I will say about one whole entire day we spent just basically being the crowd that cheers for what the two stars, Kevin James and Vince Vaughn are doing right at the end of the movie which you will have to see because out of courtesy I do not want to tell about.
At some point we were all ushered up to the second level where our next scene was the one that appeared in all of the previews for this movie. That would be the scene where Kevin James gets up from his seat in the 200 section and announces that they are on the Jumbotron! Then he proceeds to do all of his dancing with me in the row right behind him and it’s only another moment before all of us are up and basically doing the same dance to the Chicago Blackhawks theme song, “Chelsea Dagger.” For quite some time I was seen in that preview including in the theaters and got a nice snapshot off a preview that was showing somewhere on the internet and took it and showed it to all of my friends, too!
There were even apparently enough scenes with the Chicago Blackhawks Ice Crew, hockey’s version of a spirit squad/cheerleaders on ice skates, that I recognized a couple of them, Paige and Jenna, in the recent Stanley Cup Parade through Downtown Chicago after they won the Stanley Cup in June of 2013. The girls from the Ice Crew were among all the rest of the team riding on the top of those double-decker busses in that big parade, there through Downtown Chicago. I took the Metra Train to Downtown Chicago from the Random Lake Beach Metra Station to see that parade that day and had a great trip and got a lot of great pictures including those of my first glimpse of the Stanley Cup, too!
The story about that movie that I worked on at the United Center where I also had worked with the girls of the Ice Crew, how it ended was when on the last day of the shoot Jon, who I know I introduced earlier from Atmo Casting, came out and looked around at the crowd and then grabbed me and I was instantly upgraded to my brand new job of a “Guest Services Person” and went all through the wardrobe and hair routine all over again. Now it was also Jon who upgraded me a year or so earlier on a job called Pleading Guilty which I will detail in a moment after I’m all through with The Dilemma.
My time spent working as a Guest Services Person amounted to a long shot of me standing in a portal at the top of the lower section at an entrance to the mezzanine and it was an awesome roll to be playing and while it felt fun being a Guest Services Person, it didn’t go on my resume albeit a nice wardrobe of long sleeve blue dress shirt and bright red vest! I did get to meet Ron Howard at one point, though, and said, “Excuse Me” as I walked past him, there, noticing I’m kind of taller than Opie is today!
When I arrived at the location for this next movie I pulled in the parking lot and showed the Security Guy that I had my window thing already all nicely made-up. It said Matadors and probably the name of the casting company. The Security Guy replied to me with how nice the sign was that I had all made up and it proved I did all my studying prior to the days shoot, too, including having looked up all the main actors and what shows they had worked on. He said, “Very nice. . . except this is Pleading Guilty.”
Long story short the guy I was looking forward to working with that day would not be there, instead I spent all day working with a guy wearing a “Bones” jacket. It was the other day I was talking about earlier when Jon upgraded me, this time to a Stand-In and when I got home I looked up the guy with the “Bones” jacket. He turned out to be Hart Hansen the producer of this new pilot for a TV series we were working on and currently also the producer for the TV series, “Bones.”
The scene we were shooting consisted of a lawyer who was talking to somebody at a skate park and we were surrounded by guys who were experts on skateboards who were from Los Angeles. As a Stand-In I took the lawyers position while they set up each and every shot and it was my turn to be surrounded by those experts flying high above my head in every scene that we set up while I worked that day as the B-Team.
Eventually I would combine those two great upgrades that I received both from Jon, towards getting my S. A. G. card, but the best part of the Pleading Guilty job is yet to come! When it came time to check-out, I found myself standing in line with not only other actors and some guys with skateboards, but there were a few guys standing there with me carrying Rollerblades/inline skates. That was the moment when it occurred to me that Rollerblading or Inline skating, might be fun and I could not wait to get back home to Wisconsin and get me a brand new pair of Rollerblades to try out for myself!
As of this writing I am now up to about my fourth pair of Rollerblades on top of many, many new sets of wheels and an assortment of different new bearings that I have put on them since that day on the set of Pleading Guilty when I discovered inline skating! The best set of bearings that I have found up to this point being the ABEC-9 Bearings that I am currently running on. The year 2013 is now like my forth summer of inline skating and I even have now officially retired that very first pair that I bought the next day after that shoot, and that accompanied me on my Quake Chase 2011 and now have them set aside to go in the “EQ Guy Museum” someday.
Unfortunately Pleading Guilty was never picked up and never went on to be a major TV series that shot in Chicago. One that we worked on more recently DID, though. A pilot called Betrayal was shooting scenes at the Illinois Railway Museum outside of Marengo, Illinois in the Spring of 2013 and I was lucky enough to get called to work there on this great new ABC-TV Series that has since been picked up and I worked on it again yesterday as I write this on July 31, 2013.
At the Illinois Railway Museum someone was arriving at a station and we pretty much just walked back and forth looking like people who might actually be at a railroad station in real life, you know. Until we were all done shooting exteriors and they asked which of us were never seen by the camera all day, because a lot of them were. I hadn’t been since I was holding inside their Railroad Depot there and just watching for a lot of the day and as a result I was chosen to stick around into the evening and got to work with two of the stars of the show inside of a railroad car in the museums railroad yard.
As of this writing I have not seen that pilot episode so I do not know if you can see me in it. I can tell you I had a great seat facing the two actors until one of the Assistant Directors decided I should turn around and be seated with my back to the camera instead. It had by then been a fairly long day so I turned around and we shot a lot of scenes with the back of my head facing the camera.
The Illinois Railway museum is located like halfway between Chicago and Rockford, Illinois and there have been a lot of movies shot there over the years. Probably my all time favorite is League of Their Own. Where the most famous scene shot there was the one where Lori Petty and Gina Davis chase the train, throw their bags onto it, and jump on. One of the volunteers there on the day of the shoot also reminded me of the series of scenes where the train then makes a lot of different stops in different towns where the depot and platform were simply decorated differently for each take to make it look like the train was stopping in a different town!
Betrayal was a success! The TV series was picked up by the ABC-TV network and as of late July 2013 is now back in Chicago shooting the first episode and probably more. I know because late on Monday Night this week I received an E-Mail to work on the show Tuesday, July 30, 2013 and got up very early, like 3:55am, and drove down to Downtown Chicago where we shot scenes along the streets of downtown all day! Including one particular scene where they directed me to do one of those famous shots where I got to walk in between the star and the camera and got a huge Close-Up! Time will tell if that great Close-Up of me makes the final cut of that episode, but for today you could say it feels just like my best day of Chicago Film Production ever!
Prior to yesterdays great shoot, my best had been a day when I was cast as a “Mobster Mourner.” Wearing a very nice all black outfit I was cast to be a mourner at the wake of the father of the main character in the show. In that scene three of us discussed what we should do about the guys who killed him in a rather animated scene with no sound. I carefully watched ever so closely through the end of the series Mob Doctor all the way to the very end of the last episode to see if we were in it and never seen us. No trace of the scene, nor of the wake at all. That show was long ago canceled, too.
Luckily I worked on yet another great show late last year, and early this year, called Chicago Fire and got a great Close-Up in an episode of that show. I was cast as an “Orderly” and wardrobed all up in a scrub suit to work at the Nursing Station where the two paramedics come in with a gurney.
I was directed to walk past the counter and grab a couple little items such as gauze and exit. When it came time to shoot, it turned out the two paramedics entered from a door right near where I was told to walk and I now had to walk past them to get behind the counter at the nurses station. Well the camera would be right there in my face again and there is today a great Close-Up of me in that episode from season one. Chicago Fire was picked up for a second season and while they did just cast for the next hospital scene, they never called me so it doesn’t look like I’ll be seen on that show playing an “Orderly” again anytime soon.
There was one other big show that I worked on not long ago, too. Kelsey Grammer was playing the Mayor of Chicago in a TV series titled BOSS. Great day of work and a pleasant part of town just to the north of downtown, although I was nowhere near where Kelsey Grammer got out of his car and walked into whatever building he was heading to that day. I drove my car in a few of the scenes, and actually saw his limo in my rear view mirror a few times, too, but no Kelsey Grammer. Additionally I was reunited with a girl I had been working with since the beginning of my days in Chicago Film Production, Traci Lewis. We had a moment where we quickly established a long friendship and it was great working with her that day.
Looking at Traci’s resume on IMDB would probably be very similar to my own list of projects right up to the end of the 1990’s. Probably the most famous was my very first big movie job, which was also established at some point one day to have also been her first movie titled Cold Justice. Having started out as a Casting Assistant and a Production Assistant, Traci works these days as a Second Assistant Director, and has been right there working in the Chicago Film Production biz the same as me for all of those years, too! Although I worked a lot in Hollywood and Traci has worked a lot of different places around the country and the world, too.
In the summer of 2008 there might not have been quite so much film production work happening and so I also did some work in those days as an Event Security person and worked on a lot of shows such as the big Maroon 5, Kid Rock, Lady Antebellum concert up at Lambeau Field in Green Bay back in 2011, as well as an Elton John concert and many other such jobs and my Grand Finale was “Umphree’s McGee at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee where I worked with that band for 3 whole nights!
That is all of the latest stuff that The EQ Guy does when he is not tracking earthquakes. My primary work, though, throughout the majority of all of those most recent years has been to track every single major windstorm, and etc. and write all up in my EQ Blog and on my EQ Twitter with all about when and where the next major earthquake might strike.
As of the Summer of 2013 the process of writing in my EQ Blog on a daily basis and then posting it at my EQ Twitter and EQ Guy Facebook page is a great system that is working well for me. I have thousands of readers, as well as thousands of followers on my EQ Twitter and am now officially getting paid for all of my work over all of those years. For the foreseeable future it looks like that is the system I will continue to use and I want to personally thank everybody who follows me or stops by and checks out the very latest in what’s happening with earthquakes all around the world. I am also presently putting together a one-hour radio show, too, and am presently checking into getting some audio clips that I want to use. That show will air September 30, 2013 on my local Back Porch Radio Station WORT-FM 89.9 in Madison, Wisconsin on their “Access Hour.” I am calling my show “The EQ Radio Show” and have thought about using the name of this book, or “Bringing Earthquakes To The Radio.”
That is pretty much the whole entire story of all that I have put into the business of tracking earthquakes all around the world as well as researching them for twenty years, now! It has been quite a lot of hard work and even actually a certain amount of work that had to be done sometimes when I had better things that I wanted to be out doing instead!
There have been a lot of successes on the road to where I am today and I hope there will be a lot more in the future! There is still a lot more research to be done and there are yet a lot more EQ Blogs to write as I continue on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life!!!
THE END
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)