Tag Archives: Earthquake

Just a Wee Blether…

About Sleeping Through the Earthquake

There was nothing unusual for me about the night of January 15, 1968. I was always a sound sleeper and I had gone to bed around 9pm, slept like a log and woke up the next morning in time for primary school.

It must have been a bit windy outside when I closed my eyes and dozed off, I honestly can’t remember. What I do remember quite clearly is my mother saying to me in the morning, “I can’t believe you slept through all that”.

She and my father had been up all night, terrified as she put it “that the house was going to blow down”. We lived in an old house – long since demolished – that had a flat roof where the washing used to be hung out. All the poles had been blown into nearby streets.

What I had slept through is now referred to as the January gale or the January storm. It started in Bermuda, moved across the Atlantic, battered the Clyde Coast and hit Glasgow with an absolute vengeance. The winds reached 140mph across the Central Belt.

A total of 20 people died in Scotland that night. In Glasgow – 30 miles from my home town of Largs – 300 houses were destroyed and 70,000 homes were damaged. Four people died when a six-ton chimney stack crashed through the roof of a tenement in Partick.

Largs officially escaped the worst of the storm but I remember walking to school that day and seeing debris all over the streets. I have a clear memory of turning into the town’s Boyd Street where a lamp standard had been bent double in the wind and was only inches from crashing through the roof of a parked car.

There were many bleary-eyed people who had had little or no sleep – but it hadn’t bothered me in the slightest. I had slept through the great January gale, one of Scotland’s worst natural disasters, as if it had never happened.

I didn’t think I could ever top that. But this week I went one better, I took “sleeping soundly” to a whole new level – this week I slept through an earthquake.

It wasn’t huge but it wasn’t tiny either – 4.1 on the Richter scale. The epicentre was 70 miles away from us in a one-horse old town called Black Canyon City.

I was out for the count but my wife was having trouble getting to sleep. She got up, left me snoozing, went through to the next room and lay down on the sofa – and the earth moved for her.

She described a sensation as though someone had been very subtly shaking the sofa, like a gentle wobble. It happened at around 11.30pm then again a few seconds later. She took a mental note of the time and when we were listening to the radio news in the morning, sure enough, it was the lead item.

Nearer the epicentre it was a lot more noticeable. A friend of mine said he thought a train was rushing past his house; people were reported to have felt their homes shaking and seeing the lights in their living room moving.

One man told the newspaper that he had heard the noise and gone outside to fetch his gun. Well this is America after all. When an unexplained and unexpected natural phenomenon occurs, the natural instinct is to shoot the damn thing.

Arizona doesn’t get many earthquakes and certainly nothing as powerful as neighbouring California. But when they do happen they are alarming. Not that I have first-hand knowledge of course, this is just hearsay on my part.

Having lived all my life in Scotland I have never experienced an earthquake. I hope I’m awake the next time one comes along in Arizona – or at least that it’s loud enough to wake me up.