IIRC if the shaking is bad enough that stuff could fall on you, you will not be able to go anywhere without falling.
No type of wise advice on what to do in an earthquake will do me any good. I have a phobia of the damn things and am up and running for the door without thinking. I know it’s what you shouldn’t do, but my lizard brain takes over and I’m powerless to do anything else. At least I’m retired and not working in skyscrapers anymore.
That depends on the contents of the room you’re in. If you’re sitting next to shelving that’s not secured to a wall, with tall narrow objects sitting on it, they could fall on you in even a modest quake.
ISTM a lot of the advice about not running out of a building is based on the assumption you’re in a neighborhood of masonry mid-rise buildings. IOW, 1950s NYC. Which used to the the only place in America anyone wrote about. The rest of the country simply didn’t exist.
A California wood frame construction house with a non-tile roof has very little that can fall off the outside and hurt you as you exit. Other than the whole house collapsing. And in that case you’d definitely be better off outside than in.
In a quake of enough duration to actually get from wherever you are to outdoors, I’m not sure that’s really such an awful plan. The only downside is if the shaking is about to get so strong that you can’t walk / run anymore, you may have passed a nice sturdy table or desk on the way to being stuck in a shelterless hallway.
For the earthquake of ‘89, the one that hit just before Game 3 of the 1989 World Series started, I was living in San Francisco and my house was exactly 1 mile from Candlestick Park as the crow flies. Just across US-101 from the ballpark. My 2 boys, then ages 5 and 3 had just woken from their afternoon naps. Their younger sister, age 1, was still asleep. I brought the boys downstairs to the family room to watch the game and I had just placed them onto the couch and turned on the TV.
Here’s a map showing the house relative to Candlestick Park —
Then it hit, and the house kept shaking and shaking. In those first 3-5 seconds when the shaking didn’t stop I knew this one was going to be a doozy, so I picked up the boys and carried them, and sprinted up the stairs to get to my sleeping daughter. The stairs had 2 right turn bends in it of 90°. I got upstairs quickly, carrying the boys, 1 in each arm, but while climbing the stairs in the shaking I was knocked against the walls. It was just a brush against the wall as I was sprinting up the stairs.
I got to my girl, still asleep in her lower bunk bed, and the boys and I joined her there until the shaking stopped. My wife was elsewhere in the house and she joined us.
The damage to the Candlestick Park stadium is well documented. In our house, which was new and had been built in the early 1980s, the only damage was one piece of artwork hanging on the wall, it fell and broke. No other damage.
No harm, no foul. Fortunately.