Earthshake

It’s amazing how adults talk using some of the funny things their kids learned growing up. Our oldest daughter Katy had a favorite movie when she was little called The Land Before Time. It was about dinosaurs and it was on a VHS tape and it’s one of those movies that she almost wore completely out playing over and over again. In that movie when the Earth rumbled the little dinosaurs would say “Earthshake!” so that is what first came to my mind when I was standing in the lobby at the Cowboy Hall of Fame Saturday night when I experienced my very first Earthquake. I guess I’ll add that to the list of things that I’ll always remember where I was when they occurred. It was kind of odd, it was definitely a strange feeling and the best way I know to describe it is like you were in a football stadium and everyone was stomping their feet and you could feel a little shaking under your feet. A small group of us were standing around visiting and weren’t really sure what was going on until it was pretty much over, almost like it didn’t register. For us it’s not all that common of an occurrence. Since Saturday I’ve heard numerous accounts from people all over the place that felt the tremor. I guess if you lived in California it would probably be a normal thing because we all know that eventually California is supposed to slide off into the Ocean anyhow. I thought we had been relatively unscathed across the state until I saw the news reports Monday morning about the damage to St. Gregory’s College where there was some brick damage to a building. I also wonder after talking to the store manager at the Lawton Coop that there may be some yet undetected grain elevator damage across the state as some of those concrete elevators are getting quite a bit of age on them. Probably the funniest thing I saw as people reported the event on facebook was the scene of the white plastic lawn furniture where one plastic chair had fallen over and it said “Oklahoma Earthquake 2011, we will rebuild”. Quite a little event and I’d say it got everyone’s attention.

We all know now that we’re not immune and one good thing about living in flat country with very few skyscrapers is that we don’t have much to fear unless it was a big one. I haven’t heard any reports of tsunamis at Lake Hefner or small children being lost in huge cracks, in fact I think there was a greater danger of falling into cracks from the drought than from our Earthquake. As I said earlier it will be one of those little items that you tuck in your memory that will probably stick with most of us that we can pinpoint our location and what we were doing when the event occurred, although it pales in comparison to many of those big events like 9/11 or the space shuttle disaster or for some that are a couple of years older than me, the assassination of President Kennedy. As I said before I was at the Cowboy Hall of Fame and had just finished the auction for the Diamond Hats which is a group of ladies that have an annual fundraiser to raise money to help with the premium sale at the Oklahoma Youth Expo. We had a great event and everybody was kind of milling around preparing to go home when the quake occurred. What will be interesting now is to see if we have any more. Living near the Meers fault as I do, we’ve always known it was possible but again it’s not something that we lose a lot of sleep over unless of course the Earth opens up and Mt. Scott falls in or it knocks over some big building, Heaven forbid.

As a follow up to last weeks article about our pharmacy situation, we’re starting to hear a little more about meetings that are occurring between OSEEGIB and the Oklahoma Pharmacy Association on ways to save the state money without driving all the state employees and teachers to mail order prescription service. I think the important thing is that the dialog has been started and we’re considering many of the other people, which is extremely important. I feel pretty good about the possibilities of a good outcome and hopefully it will be something that will work for everyone and still allow neighborhood pharmacies to exist while gaining some efficiencies and savings for the state coffers. It’s an ongoing saga and we still don’t totally know the outcome, but again, the important part is that all the parties are in the discussion and of course we’ll inform you of developments.

If you would like to contact me at the Capitol, please do not hesitate to call 1-800-522-8502 or email me at donarmes@okhouse.gov

And here’s a little something to think about as you go down the road:
An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men. ~Ignazio Silone