We demand more sloshing pools!

I haven't mentioned anything about the Easter earthquake in this blog, but I did add a comment to David Allen's blog post about the earthquake. Allen described his impressions of the earthquake, which in a sense paralleled most of us in southern California - Is this an earthquake? How big is it? Where is it centered?

Note that I said MOST of us. I didn't personally feel the quake myself, as I noted:

I was in Ontario, walking across the room, and didn't feel anything, but the people that were sitting commented on how long the earthquake was. Then I saw the pool in the backyard and noticed that the water in the pool was in mini-tsunami mode.

A little later in the afternoon I turned on the radio and listened to KNX's coverage of the quake. This is when I learned that the epicenter was far away from us, south of Mexicali.

When you live in southern California, you learn how different media outlets cover a quake. In the case of KNX radio, they tend to take a lot of phone calls, some of which in retrospect have minimal news value. I didn't call KNX with my impressions, but obviously mine would fall into the "minimal news value" category. KNX did, however, take a call from someone who was in contact with relatives in Mexico.

But not all of us tuned into the radio. Blog commenter John Clifford noted:

Spent the next 3 hours watching SPECIAL REPORTS on the quake and the conversation turned to the sorry state of the media that showed images of sloshing pools over and over and over again.

This prompted Allen to reply:

[Hey, John Bredehoft (see above) might have found those images fascinating. -- DA]

Frankly, our local television news is often subject to ridicule for its coverage. In my mind, the most infamous occurrence was when Channel 4 had a reporter on scene in Santa Barbara, reporting LIVE, to state that Linda McCartney did NOT die in Santa Barbara, but in Arizona. (For those who don't recall the intentional confusion surrounding the death of McCartney, see here.)

But for people like me who missed the spectacular TV coverage, there's always YouTube. Temecula:



Temple City:



West Los Angeles:



Now by way of comparison, take a look at this earthquake pool coverage from Hawaii:



If you find this fascinating, I could find more videos.