   Nothing was going to hold up the long-delayed settlement of Britton
vs. Thomasini.
   Not even an earthquake.
   On the afternoon of Oct. 17, after hours of haggling with five
insurance-claims adjusters over settling a toxic-waste suit, four lawyers
had an agreement in hand.
   But as Judge Thomas M. Jenkins donned his robes so he could give
final approval, the major earthquake struck, its epicenter not far from
his courtroom in Redwood City, Calif.
   The walls shook; the building rocked.
   For a while, it looked like the deal -- not to mention the courtroom
itself -- was on the verge of collapse.
   "The judge came out and said, `Quick, let's put this on the
record,'" says Sandy Bettencourt, the judge's court reporter.
   "I said, `NOW?'
   I was shaking the whole time." A 10-gallon water cooler had toppled onto the floor, soaking the
red carpeting.
  Lights flickered on and off; plaster dropped from the ceiling, the walls still shook and an evacuation alarm blared outside.
  The four lawyers climbed out from under a table.
  "Let's close the door," said the judge as he climbed to his
bench.
  At stake was an $80,000 settlement involving who should pay what
share of cleanup costs at the site of a former gas station, where underground
fuel tanks had leaked and contaminated the soil.
  And the lawyers were just as eager as the judge to wrap it up.
  "We were never going to get these insurance companies to agree
again," says John V. Trump, a San Francisco defense lawyer in the case.
  Indeed, the insurance adjusters had already bolted out of the
courtroom.
  The lawyers went to work anyway, duly noting that the proceeding
was taking place during a major earthquake.
  Ten minutes later, it was done.
  For the record, Jeffrey Kaufman, an attorney for Fireman's Fund, said he was "rattled -- both literally and figuratively."
  "My belief is always, if you've got a settlement, you read
it into the record," says Judge Jenkins, now known in his courthouse
as "Shake'Em Down Jenkins."
  The insurance adjusters think differently.
  "I didn't know if it was World War III or what," says Melanie
Carvain of Morristown, N.J.
  "Reading the settlement into the record was the last thing on
my mind."
