Landers Rupture — Sue on what it felt like

I had felt earthquakes before Landers but never anything like that – a magnitude 7.3 – and in the Pasadena area we weren't right on top of it but it's still like nothing I had ever experienced before. It's like one second you're asleep and the next second it's like a giant picks up your house and starts shaking it back and forth violently and there's all sorts of noises from mostly the built environment. You have transformers exploding, so the first thing I tried to do I, I have three kids who were quite young, and I was trying to convince them to get up and go underneath their beds, which I thought would be a safer place to be. Oh I'm not sure they ever fully woke up; when things finally settled down, they kind of got out of bed and I quickly went into the office in Pasadena, so that's a Pasadena field office, and things were very different back then. It was really before the advent of the web, which was just barely in its infancy, so work didn't happen remotely and the analysis of data – that all happened at the office