They used to play an evacuation video before every Giants game at Candlestick Park. On the hazy, small, barely visible scoreboard screen, arrows urged spectators toward their "orderly line" of safety in the unlikely -- they always included the word "unlikely" -- case of an emergency.
In California, while driving on bridges or walking under overpasses or sitting in enormous structures like Candlestick, we know there's really only one kind of emergency: earthquake. We have become walking seismometers, able to feel a tremor and immediately dismiss it as a "3" or a "2," as unworthy of serious concern as a romance novel. And when it hits like thunder and pitches side to side -- as it did when a 6.0 woke my town in the dead of night on Aug. 24 this year -- we know the difference. For a few seconds, as the house creaks and rocks and the street lights sway, the unthinkable becomes possible: Is this The Big One?
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