I’ve been monitoring the fallout from the earthquake in China all night, wondering what would happen if one of that magnitude struck here.

The last major quake we had on Oahu a few years ago I remember vividly. It was 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning and I turned on the tube to watch the NFL early game. New Orleans was playing, and that was as far as I got.

By the time I figured out nobody was shaking my bed, I looked out the window to see the lights on our eighth-floor tennis court at our condo swaying like palm trees, nearly touching the ground to the left, then the right. The tenants on the 40th floor, I could only imagine how much our building swayed and what they were going through.

Not long after, all power was gone. I had to use a flashlight to make it down 10 flights of stairs to the parking garage, then drove through downtown to the office with no traffic lights to help along the way.

First in the office and it was pitch black and eerily quiet. All the landlines were out so we started calling reporters on cellphones to assess damages throughout the islands and we posted updates through the use of backup generators.

Blogger Cat Toth was working for the paper at the time and was on vacation on Kauai. She had her laptop with her and was one of the few people who could post any info so we fed her info and vice versa.

Earthquakes are freaky.

You want to get outside and your mind tells you if you do, all the shaking will stop. You want to believe it would be like leaving a fun house at a fair or carnival.

Nope.

When I was in the big earthquake in Tacoma in 2002, I remember getting out to the parking lot as other co-workers jumped under desks. When I stepped outside I fully thought everything would be normal, but I remember seeing everything rocking and all I could do was look at the ground and wonder if it would open up suck me in.

Living in Hawaii, we also have to worry about tsunamis an earthquake may bring. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center does a great job of posting updates whenever there is a threat, but when nothing was posted overnight to say if Hawaii was in danger from the China earthquake, I called.

The China quake was too far inland to cause any rift with ocean waters was the basic response. But even better, they were continuing to monitor the quake and asked for information on casualties. They’re human, just like us.

I can only imagine what the people in China are going through today. If you have an earthquake experience, share it here.

And if you’re wondering about the overnight shift, two sites we check all the time are the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the Hawaii Volcano Observatory for earthquakes in Hawaii.

If one hits, we want to be as ready as humanly possible, and we want you to be ready, too.