Earthshaking....

I have to say that the most unforgettable moment I had in Taipei was the night that a 6.0 plus magnitude earthquake woke us up just before dawn. Laura and I were asleep, as was everyone else in the hotel, I'm sure. All of a sudden I remember sitting straight up in bed because the emergency lights above our door were flashing, and that is when I noticed that my bed was shaking uncontrollably.

I looked over at Laura and noticed that she was still asleep (the girl slept like a rock!) and I yelled out to her that were having an earthquake. She sat up and and said "oh my God, what do we do, get in the bathtub?" and I yelled back to get under the doorframe. She'd never been in a quake before, and I had grown up with them. otherwise we would've both ended up in the tub! And even though I had grown up in Southern California where quakes of all sizes are a pretty regular occurence, this seismic turbulence was by far the worst I had ever experienced. It felt like the floor was rolling underneath our feet for more than 10 minutes, although it was under a minute. We both prayed out loud and squeezed our eyes shut until it was over. Then I ran over to the phone, called my mom, told her what had happened, grabbed Laura and we ran down the hall getting the other girls.

Now it is a good thing that I called my mom. She has a tendency towards being melodramatic and panicky to begin with, and I knew that this quake was going to make the news. And of course, the news....gotta love em...kept reporting that the epicenter was in Taipei City when it was actually in Taichung which was 60 miles away. They kept running footage of several high rise apartment complexes knocked over like dominoes and were giving the death count for Taipei, when in actuality it was in Taichung.....my mom would have had a cornonary had I not called when I did....not to mention all the phone lines in and out of the country were dead in the next hour.

After we grabbed all the other girls, we ran down the stairs from the 12th floor and started feeling aftershocks on the way down. I remember being able to visualize the walls in that narrow staircase collapsing on us. Not a good feeling. We made it to the lobby and sat there waiting for news, the agency to call, anything. We just didn't know what else to do or where else to go.

In the lobby, just after the quake:



By morning, we decided to go back to our rooms, try and get some rest and see what would happen. We had lost running water and electricity and it would remain like that for several days. You don't even want to imagine what the toilet situation ended up being like. The owner of our agency, Kitty Lai....God bless her, and several of the bookers were in constant contact with us and even so much as had food delivered to our rooms and the rooms of the girls with the other agency who also lived at the hotel and whose agents were unreachable. In the afternoon we stumbled out to take a walk and see the damage for ourselves. Although the epicenter was in Taichung and the death toll and majority of the structural damage was concentrated there, one entire hotel near ours collapsed like a house of cards and there were many cracks & gaps left in the roads and several buildings. At the park nearby, hundreds of families, whose homes were damaged or were just too afraid to go back into their high rises, camped out in tents for the better part of a week. The only food we could come across were cookies, candy and chips from the convenience stores which managed to stay open by candlelight.

Tent city at the park:



Three days after the quake we were back to doing castings. A lot of the appointments found us trudging up to 20 flights of stairs to get to offices while the elevators were still not working, and needless to say, a lot of jobs got cancelled. To say that the atmosphere among us and in the city in general was somber is to make an understatement. In a city normally full of life and din, everything was oddly quiet for a long time. Death toll was close to 2,000.