The Romaezis

Week 23: Earthquaaaaaake!

Just yesterday I thought to myself, “Wow, nothing interesting to blog about this week. Going to have to get creative.” Mother nature decided to step in and deliver Kamran’s first earthquake…and my second.

I have been pretty vague about where I live and work on this blog. A keen detective could figure it out. Our family resides in the DC metro area and as the news reports have told you by now, we had a pretty substantial earthquake in our area today. It was a 5.8 on the Richter scale with an epicenter in Mineral, VA–out in the mountains.

I came back from lunch, sat my things down on my desk, put my laptop on it’s doc, put my things in the fridge and as I started to sit down felt the building shake. I’ve felt my floor jiggle before when I worked down on the 6th floor. In a big building, I just assumed it happens. This time, however was VERY different. Everyone started to rumble, “what IS that?” I have never been in a significant earthquake before but it was pretty self explanitory. My supervisor’s door was the closest to me so started to move to her doorway. She was on a call with a client, stood up and said “What’s happening?” All I saw were things starting to topple off of her shelves behind her so I told her to come stand in the doorway. As I remembered an article I just read that you shouldn’t stand in the doorway during an earthquake. I just couldn’t remember what the article said you SHOULD do. The shaking subsided and one of our execs started waving everyone to the stairwell.

I grabbed my keys, phone and breastpump, left my laptop and headed for the stairs. I work on the 9th floor…the top of our tower. On the way down I decided that I picked a hell of a time to move to the top floor. I tried to text Kayvan on my way down and not fall down the stairs. He beat me to it and texted “earthquake?” My response was “Ya, Kam?” He confirmed that daycare evacuated the baby. That made me relax a little bit. My department finally made it to our outdoor rally point and stood in the sun for what seemed like forever. It was probably close to 45 minutes while the building engineer’s inspected the damage and determined if it was safe for us to return. As it turns out, it wasn’t. Security eventually announced that our building was closed but that if necessary, we could return to our offices via the stairwell for personal items should we need them. They also announced that we should check the company website tomorrow about the status of our office tomorrow. I mentioned that I left my laptop. So I hiked my butt all the way back up 9 flights of stairs. My boss and I took the wrong stairwell and as we began she informed me that there were 202 steps. Information I did not need to know.

I saw video outside that one of our executives took of one area on our floor. The cieling had fallen and a pipe burst. I didn’t think about this climbing the stairs until we hit the 9th floor. When I realized, figured I wouldn’t be able to open the door, but I could. It was nuts. The floor was flooded and we couldn’t get to our floor from that door. So down a flight of stairs and across the hall we went to climb to the 9th floor again. The photos hardly do the damage justice. See them at the bottom of this post.

I grabbed my things, used the restroom in preparation for terrible traffic and headed back down the stairs yet again. I have to say, the worst part of the traffic was in the garage at work. It took me about 20 minutes to get out due to the traffic headed toward DC. Once I made it out, the drive was essentially a breeze. Kayvan was bringing the babe home so I logged back on to work and caught up on e-mails from the 3 hours of work I missed.

Kamran fell asleep on the way home and must be worn out from the drama of the day. He is still asleep. It’s been 2 hours and still going strong. This week he is a big fan of rolling back to side, still loves singing and is teething hardcore. No teeth just yet but I’m hoping it isn’t much longer before those bad boys pop though. Poor boy has been chewing his little fingers like crazy. He turns them bright red.

I have concluded. This year is just abnormal.