2003-02-02 9:28 p.m.
Officer Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing
This morning there were several small earthquakes in the East Bay hills. Says the Chronicle, "Dublin police said several citizens have phoned to say they felt the shaking, but no one has reported any damage or injuries."
Re-read that. People called the police to report an earthquake. The police. An earthquake.
These people could only have been thinking one of two things:
- That the police needed to know where shaking was felt and where it wasn't, that the police were somehow unaware that there was a quake, or that they just wanted the fair citizens of Dublin to call up and say, "Hi, I'm ok." This is the talk radio theory of emergency reporting. (After every quake, no matter how minor, people start calling into the talk radio stations and reporting whether they felt the quake, what they were doing at the time and how they feel about it -- the best proof of how utterly pointless talk radio is at least 95% of the time.)
- That the police were going to do something to stop the earthquake. As if Dublin city emergency response teams were going to rush out to the scene/the fault and be able to prevent another one from happening. Your house swayed for five seconds, people. Get over it.