Before I left teaching to stay home full-time six years ago, there were some of we teachers on staff that were native Idahoans and a couple of teachers from Wyoming. We’d jokingly say we were from the “non-states”, meaning that our two states could fall into the ocean (impossible, but stated to get my point across) and it’d never make the evening news. We are states that although there are pockets of fairly large quantities of humans, for the most part, our states are still full of open spaces with a human here, a human there, etc. We’re sparsely populated.
*1890 map of Idaho with original counties which have changed since this rendering
Yesterday, a really nice mom, a former resident of southern CA and new to Idaho as of two years ago, brought up the fires and earthquakes in CA. While we were working on PTO stuff, we were talking about how catastrophic these fires are and then the conversation steered to earthquakes. It came up with another nice mom (native Idahoan), how Idaho has had earthquakes (never the magnitude of CA but there have been fatalities), fires and some of the coldest temperatures in the nation (Stanley is one frigid place!) but it’s crickets on the airwaves. A few summers ago, the town of Pocatello in southeastern Idaho, had a fire that burned 68 homes in one day, moving so swiftly, that the flames forced people to literally leave their homes barefoot and with only the clothes on their backs. There were firefighters that saw their homes go up in flames. This fire, as far as I know and my family knows, never made national news. Not enough population, we guessed.
What prompted me to write about this today, is not only yesterday’s conversation, but while out and about running errands today, I received a news blip on my phone about a small earthquake over in southeastern Idaho, seven miles east of Soda Springs for those of you familiar with the area, http://ktvb.com/mobile/article/news/local/idaho/no-damage-reported-following-eastern-idaho-earthquake/277-614905073. It was a 3.8 magnitude earthquake but that area is right on a fault line, so earthquakes aren’t all that unusual.
When I was in third grade, I got to experience my first earthquake that happened in the morning while my sister and I were getting ready for school. Due to our earthquake drills and it being the early 80’s, we dove under the kitchen table to ride that one out. Nothing was damaged that I remember. Throughout the day, there were aftershocks at school, so we spent plenty of time under the cafeteria tables and our desks. Tragically, during the initial quake of that day, two children in Challis (northwest of Lava) died while walking to school when a sign fell off of a building and hit them. This sad memory was just featured in our newspaper earlier this month. I do not envy people in earthquake country.
While our “non-state” doesn’t make the news for weather or natural disasters, we’ve been unfortunate to make every list under the sun about how great it is to live here. Someone told me recently, that every month, there are 1000 new residents moving here from other states. Yikes. I think I want to go back to being a “non-state”. Yep, I do.
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