Journal # 6 Earthquake

At 1:47am, 21th September, 1999, there was an earthquake which was ML 7.3 in Taiwan. There were over four thousand people died, and a lot of people lost their home.

I remember I went to bed very early at that day. When earthquake happened, I was dreaming. At that moment, I had felt everything was shaking, but I thought it would finish very soon. Finally, I was wrong because it continued shaking and it was getting big. I told my sister we should get out our room, but maybe my sister was still dreaming and continued asking me, “What’s going on?” Finally, I dragged her to get out our room, but it was difficult to walk out because the shaking was horizontal and vertical. Also, it was continuing about five minutes. We saw our parents and my brother in the living room, and my father told us, “Everyone doesn’t worry. We need to go outside. ” Finally, all my family got out our home and staid the square which was in front of our home. At that time, we had seen a lot of neighbor gathered together, and they talked about this earthquake might make a lot of injuries and deaths because it was so big. Actually, everyone was cold because we get out our home without jacket, but nobody wanted to go home to take jacket. That was too danger. That was first time that I felt the time was running so slowly, and when I could wake up from this nightmare. After one hour, everyone decided to go home. Actually, even thought I went back home, I was still scare the earthquake would happen again. Therefore, I didn’t go back to my bedroom; I just stayed at the living room because I thought I could run away as soon as possible if the earthquake might happen again. Also, most of cities in Taiwan didn’t have electric after the earthquake. The other terrible thing was that telephones and cell phones didn’t work. As a result, when the day was dawning, a lot of people tried to make sure their families who lived somewhere else were fine. Also, after several days, the news had continued reporting some cities which were near epicenter were very serious, and the casualties continued raising.