COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Did you feel it? I didn’t. But then, no one did.

That’s what the “The Great Southern California Shakeout” on Thursday morning was all about — a super-giga-normous virtual earthquake that showed how well prepared, or not, Southern California is for The Big One, assuming it ever does happen, which the experts assure us it will, which is depressing.

Of course I don’t know why we’re worried about earthquakes while the whole place is burning down before our eyes.

Be that as it may this was the premise for Thursday’s drill: At exactly 10 a.m. a magnitude 7.8 earthquake goes kaboom at the south end of the San Andreas fault, which is near Brawley, which is someplace you should never, ever go.

How big is a 7.8 shaker? To put it in geologic terms — real big. In fact, it’s a monster, way more powerful than the magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta quake that stood San Francisco on its head in 1989 and 5,000 times stronger than the magnitude 5.4 Chino Hills earthquake that rattled us last July.

I don’t understand the Richter Scale either, but I love when they try to explain how a decimal point or two can make a huge difference by saying, “Remember, it’s a logarithmic scale” as if we’re all going to slap our heads and say, “Oh yeah, I forgot — a logarithmic scale.”

The Great Shakeout assumptions in Costa Mesa were that a school was on fire, although the kids had been evacuated; an office building on Anton was heavily damaged, which is not good; the Neighborhood Community Center had partially collapsed, which is also not good, and the Victoria Street bridge over the Santa Ana River collapsed, which can slow traffic to a crawl.

In Newport Beach, Hoag Hospital was given a particularly nasty assumption — the roof of the Emergency Room had partially collapsed. Yikes.

So how did everyone do? All told, pretty well, thank you. And that’s the real value of these exercises — identify the stuff that doesn’t work and fix it.

If your people are going to run around with their hair on fire and bumping into each other, you want that to happen during pretend time, not the real deal.

The other thing that struck me about the Big Shakeout was what people, especially school kids, were being told to do: “drop, cover and hold on” — as in, get down, get under something sturdy and hold on until the shaking stops.

You’ll notice they’ve dispensed with the “go find a doorjamb” when it comes to a major quake. In a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, you’re not going anywhere but straight down. Drop, cover and hold on.

Hmm, talk about déjà vu all over again. Want to make someone my age smile? Just say, “duck and cover.” In the 1950s, it wasn’t earthquakes that kept us awake at night. It was nuclear missiles from Russia that were going to come soaring over the Arctic Circle just as sure as Patti Page was never going to find out how much that doggie in the window cost.

I never got that, by the way. She was outside a pet store, no? How hard can it be for someone to just tell her what the thing cost? The “duck and cover” drills were just as mysterious to me.

“When the siren sounds or you see the white flash, get under your desk immediately.” Oh yeah, that will do it.

There was also a classroom training film called “Duck and Cover,” which has become a cult classic and is painfully funny 50 years later, with a perky narrator who assures us that yes, an atomic bomb can be scary, but just get under your desk fast enough and you’ll be fine.

Personally I preferred the “Bert the Turtle” films. Bert was an animated turtle who was forever always somewhere, on his hind legs, which looked loopy enough, but Bert looked even loopier because he always wore a little Civil Defense helmet.

For reasons no one understood, a nasty little monkey would appear out of nowhere and try to send Bert to turtle heaven.

Sometimes it would toss a stick of dynamite at Bert. Sometimes he’d try to hit him with a big club. But Bert was a stud.

Every time, without fail, he would drop to the ground and disappear inside his shell while the narrator reminded us that if we just duck and cover like Bert, there were no worries. The ’50s were a much simpler time.

Bottom line — duck and cover is a little sketchy when it comes to a nuclear attack, but drop and cover is excellent advice when it comes to earthquakes.

Will the Big One ever really show up? I have no idea, but I’ll go with the experts on this who predict that eventually it has to — and if you just hang on a few thousand years, San Diego will end up just east of Oakland, and Carmel will be about 10 minutes from here, which is a little weird, but I can think of a lot worse places to be.

And that I believe is everything you need to know about drop and cover, tectonic plates, Bert the Turtle and the Richter scale.

Just remember, it’s logarithmic.

I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].