Luck Was a Lady in the Wee Hours of Saturday

The first phone call comes at 2:55 a.m., not quite 10 minutes after the whole house shakes from the quake.

This is a big one--and a close one. You know that much. But where is the epicenter? A few miles away, you predict. Twenty miles. Fifty, tops.

“Are you all right?” someone near and dear has called to find out. Her house is in West Hollywood.

OK on this end. “You?”

“We’re fine,” she says. “But they evacuated our hotel.”

She is calling from Las Vegas.

From Vegas.

“Where the heck was this quake?” you really begin to wonder at that point. Utah?

And then never mind where--what kind? Has a quake of 7.1 magnitude (or maybe 7.11) hit Las Vegas and been felt in Los Angeles? Has all of Nevada been turned into a rubble of cracked roulette wheels, broken no-arm bandits and bloodied kings and queens? Are Siegfried and Roy’s tigers loose in the hotel, eating the guests?

You don’t know. But you do what Californians typically do in an earthquake at this hour in the morning.

You go back to sleep.

*

A few hours later, you do what Californians typically do after a quake. You turn on your TV to see if it has all been a dream.

On TV, a train is derailed.

“It wasn’t a dream,” you say.

Images run through your mind. Turkey. Taiwan. Japan. Mexico. Now what? Emergency relief missions on their way to Las Vegas, to rebuild the Strip?

You wait for a comprehensive report on the quake’s destruction. How many hundreds killed. How many bridges and buildings down.

A passenger from the Amtrak train is being interviewed on TV, trackside.

“How are you?” a reporter asks.

“Well,” the passenger says, “my arm’s a little sore.”

She extends an arm and flexes, like a woman who is still a little sore from her morning’s workout with her trainer.

Wait a second, you say to yourself. Perhaps this poor woman is the sole survivor of one of the most horrible rail disasters in history.

No, says the TV reporter, “That’s it, just a few shaken-up but lucky passengers. Reporting live from here near Ludlow.”

Ludlow?

“Where the heck is Ludlow?” you ask.

You keep watching the TV. Wherever this Ludlow is, it appears to be in one piece. No buildings reported down. Ludlow doesn’t seem to have many buildings to go down.

The TV coverage continues. Damage seems minimal. Can this be true? After that tremor? A couple of bridges with small cracks. Cans on a floor in a grocery store. That’s it.

“Must not have been much of a quake after all,” you say to yourself.

“This morning’s quake had a magnitude of 7.0,” a TV anchor guy tells you.

Couldn’t be.

A happy-go-lucky tourist in Las Vegas is shown in a TV interview, singing Carole King’s “I feel the earth . . . move . . . under my feet!” She is acting truly goofy, so naturally she will be shown on every TV channel, day and night.

This is the aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake?

In another day or two, it won’t even be a 7.0. It’ll be worse, “upgraded” to a 7.1 seismological event. Imagine that. We just got hit by a 7.1 quake . . . and everything’s fine and dandy. Japan’s quake was a 7.0 and killed more than 5,000 people. Turkey’s and Taiwan’s quakes left more than 20,000 dead.

And all we have are cans on a grocery store’s floor.

*

The phone rings again, 48 hours or so after Saturday’s . . . uh, what would you call it? Natural disaster? Near-disaster? Non-disaster?

A friend back East has heard about California’s latest “disaster.” He hopes everybody is OK. He is curious how close we are to Hector.

“To Hector who?” you ask.

To the quake, he says. Television in his town has been reporting follow-up details on that 7.1 temblor in “Hector, Calif.”

“Where the heck is Hector?” you ask, not knowing Hector from Ludlow.

It turns out that Hector Mine, an old mining site in the desert, is the designated epicenter. It also turns out that there have been only two quakes in Southern California this century that were stronger than Hector’s.

It shook Los Angeles. It shook Las Vegas. Yet nothing much worse happened than a couple of snakes got rattled.

What are the odds? We rolled a 7.1 and nobody’s number was up. How lucky can you get?

*

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com