Wondering if you noticed the ground moving like waves in the ocean. I can tell you that's really peculier to witness. Back in '89 when the big one hit the SF Bay Area many folks were driving home from work, and were pulling off to the shoulder of the highway thinking they'd blown a tire. I could not remain standing in my shop due to the shaking and leaned up against my car which was also violently rocking back and forth. Several friends who were at the airport saw the seismic waves roll down the runway, just like ocean waves. Terra non-firma.
Then there's the rumble. You hear that before you feel the shaking because sound moves faster. Never heard the whoosh you describe, but then I was never in an open and very quiet area. Apparently that too is very noticeable as well as memorable.
My brother was deep sea diving off Indonesia when the seafloor ruptured and caused a catastrophic tsunami. The rupture was not audible to him, maybe too low a frequency to hear but all the burrowing creatures in the sea came out of their holes. Lobster and crab all over the place, and the water when from 200 ft visibility to turbid in about a second. Rest of his vacation was spent rescuing survivors, recovering bodies from the ocean and trying to find a place that still had an operational port.
Most of the many earthquakes I live through in CA were just an extra good E ticket ride, nothing too damaging, just exciting...until 1989. There's more to come, but I don't live there anymore. The risk of losing everything and not being covered by insurance is too great. Yea, you can buy earthquake insurance, but when there's millions of claims totaling trillions of dollars, you won't get paid anytime soon, and you may not get paid at all. Just ask the hurricane survivors on the Texas coast.
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