The calls and emails began coming into the newsroom a bit before 4 p.m. “Did something just happen? Was that … an earthquake?” One person’s email read: “What should I do?”

This is a country with a large number of people who know earthquakes only as events that happen elsewhere. Particularly Emiratis and Britons, whose homelands are tectonically dead.

Perhaps that explains why a tiny tremor felt in the UAE today led to several high-rise building being evacuated, both in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Some produced scenes of near-chaos.

There had been a serious earthquake, a 6.2-magnitude event that killed nearly 40 people … but it was 300 miles north and west of the UAE, in Iran. (Almost the distance of Los Angeles from San Francisco.) Only the farthest flung ripples of the Iran quake reached the UAE.

People who live in real earthquake zones — like, say, Californians — had trouble grasping the near-panic that seized some people here.

I did not feel a thing. I was at The National, at my desk, sitting at my desk.

However, some people in taller building felt a gentle sway, and it was outside the experience of some of them.

Residents were asked to evacuate two of the tallest towers in Abu Dhabi, but officials at those sites discovered that many nervous residents were already doing so themselves.

One man in Dubai said: “I wouldn’t say it felt like I was being shaken, but it was a very disorienting feeling.”

UAE officials said they did not immediately notify people of the magnitude of the shaking here because they feared panicking people. (For good reason, turns out.) “The problem with issuing a warning is that it can backfire and cause unintended anxiety,” said a professor at UAE University.

Summing up the situation in Iran, versus the UAE, he said: “They are at the plate edge, and the UAE is not.”

People in earthquake zones — see the ring of fire, which includes the Pacific Coasts of the Americas, Japan, Indonesia and New Zealand — have no love for earthquakes. But we come to recognize the harmless tremors from the the big events and quickly dismiss them. Whatever magnitude this was, by the time it washed ashore, it could not have been much about the 3.0 sort — which Californians ignore.

Too, it is not clear what we can do when a big one hits. (Aside from leaving low-lying sea coasts, following a big quake.) If you are in the upper stories of a big building, or crossing a bridge … you could be in trouble.

I am reminded of the 1989 Loma Prieto quake, in the San Francisco area. Two reporters for the San Bernardino Sun were at the Oakland Coliseum, covering Game 3 of the World Series, when the earthquake hit — the one that knocked down part of the Bay Bridge.

The press room at the stadium, back then, at least, was deep underground. Our two guys, when they felt the Earth move … did pretty much nothing. What could they do? If the quake was big enough to knock down the stadium, they would be buried in tons of cement … Or it was not.

They passed along word, though, of the terror of the earthquake novices, among the journalism crew, many of them from the eastern half of the U.S., where earthquakes are little-known. Some ran for the doors, some dived under tables … Our guys were embarrassed on behalf of some of them.

A noted, the UAE is nearly immune from earthquakes. An accident of geography. This parcel of land near the northeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula is old and tired and has almost no hills. No plates colliding here.

If you feel an earthquake here … it is not dangerous. It might have been, for those near where it happened — somewhere far from here.