When Ingunn Reinsbakken first felt the tremors on the stage, she thought someone was kicking the riser beneath her; but as the back-and-forth shaking grew more violent, the musician knew something was seriously wrong.
A bass clarinetist, Reinsbakken was performing in Terrace Symphony Orchestra’s annual Halloween concert at the REM Theatre Saturday Night, and they were playing a piece from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck the coast of Haida Gwaii several hundred kilometres away.
“At the point that it happened, the girl sitting beside me and I weren’t playing. We had bars of rest, and we were sitting there counting,” she remembers. “And then when things started to move we both looked at each other like ‘Oh my god, what’s going on?’”
When Reinsbakken looked up, she saw the rows of huge white stage lights swaying from their chains above her head.
At first, the orchestra continued to play, but as the musicians realized what was happening, they dropped off one by one; before long, the music had stopped and they were heading for the wings as many of the audience members – made up mostly of kids in costume and their parents – rushed to the exits, and anxiously checked iPhones to find out what was happening.
“We just had this earthquake preparedness thing a couple of weeks ago, so my first thought was, ‘Get underneath something ‘ – but there was nothing there that we could get underneath,” she says. “So that’s why we all decided to move off the stage and into the wings, especially with all the lights hanging there.“
There weren’t any major concerts happening on Haida Gwaii this weekend, but Roeland Denooij says there was more than enough shaking going on.
The Edge of the World Music Festival artistic director was at home in the tiny seaside community of Tlell when the earthquake – the second largest ever recorded in Canada – struck shortly after 8 p.m. When he realized what was happening, he rushed upstairs to get his 14-month-old son out of his crib, but the shaking was so violent that it was difficult to walk.
“His crib was rattling against the wall,” says Denooij, whose three-year-old daughter was just getting ready to go to bed when the tremors began and the power went down, leaving the entire family in pitch black.
“My first thought was, ‘Is this ever going to end?’ But it just kept going, and I didn’t know if the house was going to take it. I mean I built the house so I knew it could take a lot,” says Denooij, who also works as a carpenter. “But it was to that point where you’re like, if it’s any more than this, things are going to break. All the windows were rattling and everything was shaking.”
Because they live beside the ocean, tsunami fears soon took over, and everyone in the community got into their cars and headed for higher ground, having no idea what was happening, or how bad it was, because they had no cell phone or internet service.
As he recounts the story, another aftershock hits – this one enough to shake the pictures on his wall. “It’s ok, it’s all done,” he says to his daughter, who is clearly concerned. “No one has really slept because all night long there has been a shake every 15 to 30 minutes – and we sleep upstairs so it’s even more pronounced.”
“So I think it’s going to take a couple days for everyone to sort of put it behind us – and hopefully there’s not another big one.”
Amazingly, five minutes after the quake, the Terrace Symphony Orchestra returned to the stage and performed the rest of their show – starting right back where they left off – for the audience members who remained, even though the stage lights hadn’t yet stopped swaying.
“Most people said it was scary when it happened, but then after that it was exciting,” says Reinsbakken. “We knew we weren’t really in any danger, and there wasn’t any serious damage, so it was just an adrenaline rush. But it was weird and exhilarating at the same time.
“And it sure made for a pretty exciting concert.”
↧
Terrace Symphony Orchestra gets on-stage shake during major West Coast quake
↧