Earthquake

Last Sunday evening, at around 11.00 p.m. there was an earthquake. I was in bed, in that halfway state between wakefulness and sleeping, when I felt the house (and my bed) shake. It only lasted a second or two and was accompanied by a rumbling sound, like distant thunder. I've had similar experiences in other countries and although, at the time, it was a strange sensation it was over very quickly and it wasn't long before I was asleep.

In the morning as I walked to the office I met our cleaner with her young son, aged about 4 or 5. She told me that her son was late for school because the whole family had been awake for several hours in the night, following the earthquake, as they waited anxiously to the radio listening for a tsunami warning. As I talked to other colleagues as they arrived for work it became clear that quite a number of them had also been similarly unnerved by the earthquake.

We are by the coast and there are signs up in every neighbourhood giving information about where people should go in the event of a tsunami warning and how far it is to what is deemed to be a safe place. However, I certainly hadn't thought that Sunday evening's small tremor would cause a tsunami.

Which made me wonder:

• am I the uninformed and naive foreigner who doesn't understand the potential level of danger, or
• have the local population been so traumatised by recent acts of nature that anything that has the potential to cause more death and destruction is terrifying to them?

Both questions probably contain some level of truth.