Most likely you will have heard about yesterday's 6.3 magnitude earthquake in Bushehr, Iran, which killed 37 people. What you probably don't know is that the tremors could be felt across the Arabian Sea here in Abu Dhabi as well, a mere 600 km away.
At around 16:00 on Tuesday, sitting at my desk in the office, I suddenly felt a little dizzy. I looked around but didn't notice anything really abnormal, only the office door opposite mine moved like someone had just touched it whilst walking past. So, I just put this funny feeling down to me now having been well for a few days and not eating properly, therefore just being low on sugar-levels and light-headed, and carried on working.
However, a few minutes later our secretary came running over from the other "wing" of our office, rather flustered. It then transpired that we all had felt the building's swaying and experienced this weird sensation of dizziness but no-one had thought much of it. We looked out the windows, couldn't see any funny business that would've had us worried and went back to our desks after a quick chat about "earth-quake-experiences" a few of us have had, including me, 1 in Germany (tremors from a Belgian quake) and 1 in Mexico (tremors from the active volcano Popocatépetl).
About 30 minutes later via a very crackly tannoy announcement we were asked to leave the building. Although, we could only really make out the words earth-quake and evacuate in the 3rd announcement. Not good. We still didn't take it too seriously, after all it had been half an hour since the actual shake-incident. Luckily the lifts were still working (though probably not a place you'd want to be stuck during a real earth-quake) so we didn't have to walk down from the 27th floor like we did during the fire-drill just 2 weeks ago.
We were then held outside in between all the high-rises in Sowwah Square and were told that Civil Defence had ordered the evacuation and building management had to wait for their clearance to let us back into the building. It is a tad awkward to be standing amongst those 30-level high-rises when Civil Defence seems to be concerned about aftershocks. Is that really the safest place in an actual emergency? Wouldn't it be better to move people towards the water, away from the buildings, where any potential debris or any building parts falling down wouldn't threaten to decapitate the "saved" mass waiting for further instructions?
I know this was really nothing and everyone made jokes about the situation or complained that there was soooo much work waiting on the desk. But, Iran is hit with earthquakes on a relatively frequent basis and the devastation there was pretty severe, so I think we should just be very grateful that the tremors we felt were so insignificant, despite it being a 4.0 on the Richter-scale (classed as moderate).
Yet, this exercise highlighted the fact that the UAE still is kind of a developing country and there is still much to learn by the officials. Let's hope that we never come to experience a real emergency here or anywhere else and share a thought for the poor people in Iran.
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