Will It Shake? The Bookshelves

Bookshelves are great.  In small apartments, they act as convenient places to store all kinds of things.  For avid readers, music, DVD collectors, and people who work at home, they provide ideal storage for all their documents and media.

Carolyn Chitty is both an avid reader and  she works at home.  So of course she has bookshelves packed with books and movies, as you might expect.  To save space, she has stacked them one on top of the other, to take advantage of the high ceilings in her home.

Great idea, right?

We’ll be honest.   We here at Totally Unprepared got the willies just watching the video of Carolyn standing next to her unsecured bookshelves.

We recreated Carolyn’s bookshelves on the shaketable at UCSD’s Jacob’s School of Engineering.

We’re sure you can guess what happens next.

Carolyn, we want you to prepare, so you’ll survive unhurt in an earthquake. Recovering from the shaking will be kind of tough for you if you are trapped under a pile of books and movies.  So please, please secure your bookshelf!