Earthquakes and your farm/homestead or garden!

@ninnymary, The ones I call yawners are the little bitty ones... then there's the ones that get your attention for a few moments but you realize they aren't bad enough to warrant concern. The bad ones, like the 1989 one (I lived only about 1/2 an hour from the epicenter at the time) are very scary.
And yes, @baymule, I've cleaned up a right nasty mess-- sticky and full of glass shards! Luckily at the time I only had a few jars jiggle their way off the shelf; when I think of how many I have in my pantry now....

What scares me these days about earthquakes is that we live within sight of Mt Shasta and Mt McLaughlin... two very much NOT EXTINCT volcanoes... and what an earthquake would mean now.

I had quite a few days to prepare for Mt St. Helens.

The problem was that it didn't occur to me how to prepare.

Local media was so unhelpful. Leading up to the eruption, the event of the day or a sound bite interview were all important. One thing not to panic people but it generated a tourist interest. Witness how many of the dead were people who went out of there way to be there ...

I wonder what discussions were going on downhill about ashfall and flood danger. I was seriously uninformed. Where were the international interviews of people in Indonesia or the Philippines or Italy?

The mess the eruption made on just ordinary people's lives was extraordinary. Sheltering in place was the only defense until street crews and blessed rain began to dampen down the ash problem. Me. I'd much preferred to have been gone that year.

Steve

I'll take hurricanes over earthquakes. Sure, there's dozens of hurricanes spawned every year, but at least we see 'em coming and can get out of the way, if needed.

To me wildfire is the scariest. Having lived in a state that is perpetually burning up did little to make me casual. The year we moved was the year of a devastating fire that took hundreds of homes in our old neighborhood, as well as the forests where we used to hike.