Rolling With a Quake, New York Style

When I heard about the earthquake in Manhattan last week, I called my mother immediately.

“How are you?” I asked. “Did you feel the quake?”

“Oh, the earthquake,” she said. “I forgot about it, but now I remember. Everything north of 72nd Street was leveled. It’s all gone. Everyone’s dead. How are you?”

Her sarcasm showed how utterly clueless New Yorkers are when it comes to earthquakes. New York can do very well at hot dogs, muggings, Broadway plays, ex-first lady senators, New Year’s Eve in Times Square and great Chinese food, but it cannot handle a garden-variety earthquake with any class at all.

As we all know here, there is a proper way to respond when one is asked if he or she felt the quake:

“You bet I did. It was kind of a sliding cross between Loma Prieta and Northridge, without that heavy rolling thing and not as--oh, tumultuous, I guess you’d say--as a series of quick, sharp jolts, but more like the roller-coaster feeling of that one out by Joshua Tree, remember that one?”

Public officials in New York also proved to be miserable failures at earthquake protocol.

Initial reports had it that the epicenter of Tuesday’s quake was in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, took that as a slight and countered it immediately, according to the New York Times:

“Mr. Giuliani appeared on television from outside a courier company in Long Island City, Queens, where some heavy shaking had been reported and proclaimed that the earthquake occurred first and its effect was biggest beneath his city.”

What municipal official in Southern California would sally forth and boldly lay claim to an earthquake? Would any local mayor tell reporters, in effect: “I don’t care what the Caltech pinheads think about the epicenter being in Santa Barbara, I say that earthquake is a one-hundred-and-ten-percent genuine Ventura County earthquake and I’m darned proud of it!”

In Southern California, officials want to stick their cities’ names on shopping malls, not on subterranean forces of nature, savage and terrifying. As they say in New York, go figure.

I’m not sure what they’ll name the New York quake. Its epicenter, as it turned out, was pinpointed on East 83rd Street between Second and Third avenues. If naming standards are the same for quakes east of the Mississippi, that means it could go down in seismic history as the Fashionable Upper East Side earthquake.

It rolled through at 7:34 a.m., a time when most New Yorkers have arisen, stretched, sipped their coffee, peered out at the teeming streets, and said, at least once, “Whuddya, crazy?”

The quake did not interrupt their morning routine. While police fielded hundreds of calls about the earth’s sudden shaking, many people thought it was just another underground gas explosions popping manhole covers off the street. One caller reported that all of his tropical fish had converged on a corner of the tank--as logical a response as any, I guess, to a 2.8 quake.

That’s right--two-point-eight, a shaker so puny that if it made the evening news here, it would come behind half a dozen car chases and a story about a duck that can untie its owner’s shoes.

But what can I say? In New York, it was a big deal.

Of course, if it were a really big deal--like, say, a 6.4 that knocked the power out for a while--New Yorkers would be pathetically stranded.

You think you can buy a generator in New York and lug it home on the Lexington Avenue bus?

New York has some of the greatest cultural attractions in the world, but it doesn’t have a big-box hardware store. If you’re lucky you can buy a flashlight battery in New York, but not a generator.

And if you did happen to own a generator, where would you get the gas to run it?

Manhattan real estate is far too expensive for a gas station. The closest one is, as I recall, in Indiana.

And do you think anyone in New York can actually operate something as frighteningly rustic as a generator? Native New Yorkers (like me, sad to say) have grown up without the do-it-yourself gene. To install a VCR, not to mention a generator, they have to call the super out of the room in the basement where he keeps his bourbon and dirty magazines and hope he shows up sometime that week.

That wouldn’t be much solace for New Yorkers in a real earthquake, nor would the earthquake kit many Californians claim to have stashed somewhere around the house.

You think there’s space in a 300-square-foot New York apartment for a duffel bag crammed with jeans, sweaters, cash, a week’s emergency rations, boots, gloves, a camping stove and a crowbar?

You think there’s a whole extra room for a couple of 50-gallon plastic barrels filled with water you can drink when the building’s pipes snap like potato sticks?

You have any idea what rents are in the city?

Whuddya, crazy?

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com or at 653-7561.