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Monday, June 28, 2010
Earthquake!
Wednesday, as I have already mentioned, was my birthday. It was a pretty normal work day, as far as they go, until the early afternoon. Suddenly, it felt like my chair was swaying a bit. I looked around, and then others began to react the same way. Their chairs were swaying, too! We figured it was probably an earthquake. My first reaction was, naturally, to post it to twitter. It was there that I learned that there were others who felt it – someone in Toronto and someone in New York. This was apparently far-reaching! The reports began to pour in on twitter, and even though I couldn’t yet find any information about it online, I knew that people down as far south as Cincinnati had felt it, and people in Vermont, Connecticut, New York and New Hampshire were stating they’d felt it.
Later, news articles started to show up stating that the epicenter was in Ontario. Or else it was Quebec. Nobody was really sure yet. But they were pretty sure it was either a 5.0 or a 5.5. Really specific, right? Still later, they finally narrowed it down to the Ottowa area on the Ontario/Quebec border. The consensus seems to be that it was a 5.5. It is amazing to me how far away the quake reached. Down to Cincinnati! That’s quite a distance.
Earthquakes aren’t totally new to me. We got a couple in Oregon when I lived there. It was, of course, nothing like what is experienced in California, but we got a few. I remember one that was strong enough to merit evacuating our school until they could assess whether there had been any damage that could endanger our precious teenage lives. It was otherwise unremarkable. We stood on the football field, whining and bored until they deemed the school safe for us to re-enter. This one wasn’t even that remarkable. Being on the third floor, we experienced some swaying, but people who were on the ground floors of buildings sometimes felt nothing. Johnathan was driving at the time and didn’t feel it at all.
The little earthquake was kind of a fun diversion. There was no real damage to speak of, even, apparently, closer to the epicenter, and nobody died as a result of the shake. We did get a little excitement with people texting friends and relatives to find out whether they felt it or not, and scouring twitter and google for results that would tell us the epicenter and more about how far-reaching it was. Nobody was scared; we all got excited instead. It was kind of like a birthday distraction from the average humdrum of everyday working.
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