I’ve just experienced my first earthquake, having felt tremors at 5 a.m. this morning… woke me out of a good sound sleep, it did. My sweet birds are traumatized; Bard was flapping around so hard, he lost a feather that turned into a bleeder… poor wee thing. I guess it was a 4.5 centered near the Georgia/Alabama border, from what’s being reported on the news.
Hope all is well with person and property for Alabama and Georgia folks-- and anyone else who was a’shakin’ and a’quakin’.
Thanks geek and James… it wasn’t too bad, it took me a few seconds to even figure out what it was. I’ll blame that on the disorientation from waking up unexpectedly. There was a really low “hum” of sorts, and the shaking lasted a good 30 seconds. My pictures on the wall are a bit skewed, but that’s about all that happened. My birds and cat are finally calmed down-- took the birds a while to stop huffing and puffing and flapping. Turns out Bard had a bleeder on each of his wings… I’m just glad the bleeding stopped on its own. Had me a bit worried.
Anyhoo, enough rambling from me. Say hi back to Shannon, James!
For some reason I was wide awake at 5AM when it went through Decatur (just east of Atlanta). But we didn’t get that much–just kind of a “whump” and a feeling like a wave went through the house, like somebody had snapped a rug under us. Not bad, though–must be all those buildings in Atlanta holding the ground down.
Rather disorienting, aren’t they? You never really get used to them (despite what we Californians like to claim!), but when you live here, you at least get more or less comfortable with the IDEA of them. Animals get even more blase…my dog doesn’t even notice unless we get a shaker of magnitude 6 or greater!
The US Geological Survey collects data on earthquakes…including surveys of what people felt. If you like, go to http://www.usgs.gov , click on “earthquakes” and fill out their survey form. It really helps them with their studies, and is kind of fun too. It’s also just a really interesting site…you can read all about the big Alaska and California quakes and be glad you live in a place where a little 4.9 makes the national news!
Yea I woke up early this morning and thought my bed was shaking a little. I was half-unconscious so I just went back to sleep thinking I was still sort of dreaming. Nice to know I’m not crazy.
Here’s the USGS page pertaining to this quake. Gives you all the latest info…currently estimated magnitude (which is almost always revised once all the data are in), depth, epicenter, exact time, etc. Down at the bottom of the page you’ll find the “Did You Feel It?” link, which will take you to the survey.
The Southern U.S. has a rather large fault…it doesn’t go very often, though a huge quake along it is expected sometime in the future (which is why we deliberately avoided buying a brick home when we lived in NC…wood houses wobble, but brick usually collapses).
Gotta love California building codes - these days, even unsupported brick chimneys are out. But after making it through the Loma Prieta quake (6.9+) with no more damage than some books falling from shelves I’m a believer.
I had a hard time explaining California building codes to a visiting Irish friend, though - the lack of brick and stone struck him as shoddy. He asked “And how long do houses last here? 20 years or so?”. I told him “Much longer than a stone or brick house in an earthquake”, but I suspect he still thinks we need to replace them far too often.
FWIW, I believe the biggest quake recorded anywhere in US territory in the last 200 years was in the Mississippi valley - the New Madrid quake. Apparently, the faults there don’t give often - but when they do it’s a real doozey.
I was in Loma Prieta too (they still waffle as to whether it was a 6.9 or a 7.1…seeing what it did to our area, I vote for the latter). Fortunately, I was in Monterey, where not much damage was done (a co-worker of mine, however, had a masonry chimney fall through her roof and land on her bed…good thing it happened in the early evening instead of at night or early in the morning!). Another co-worker was driving home on some backroads when the roadbed dropped 4 feet…all four tires on his pickup blew simultaneously!). Downtown Santa Cruz was devastated (for some reason, that never made the news)…all but three or four buildings either collapsed or were damaged so badly they had to be torn down (including the beautiful old Cooper House, which we still mourn). Holy Cross Church (the beautiful white church on Mission Hill, which is visible from just about everywhere in Santa Cruz) lost its steeple…it just crumpled. Downtown merchants were in tents for nearly 10 years, while the city tried to reconcile rebuilding a historic district with modern building codes!
When we first moved to NC, I was actually a bit shocked at all the brick homes there…it was only about six months after Loma Prieta, and by that time I’d seen enough crumbled and brick and dissolved mortar to swear that I’d never live in a brick house.
Fortunately, neither of our family’s houses in Mount Hermon was damaged (good, flexible wooden construction!), but in one of the houses (actually just a cabin), the refrigerator had walked across the floor, unplugged itself, tipped forward just enough to open the door and then defrosted itself all over the kitchen floor! Ugh…what a mess! All my father in law’s stored wine bottles had jumped out his closet wine rack, but fortunately landed on carpet and didn’t break. The house we’re living in now had a few cracked tiles, but that was it.
Ah, life in the Golden State…such a moving experience!
But we get a bit blase’ about earthquakes - it takes something close to a 5.0 before we really pay attention beyond “yup, that’s a quake”. And we develop reflexes about larger ones (take cover, don’t try to go outside unless you’re right by the exit, shelter under tables or in doorways) that can kick in without conscious thought.
I still recall a mid-sized quake back in the early 80’s not because it was big (about 5.6, as I recall) but because we had a new man who’d just moved to California the week before. I was working in our lab, a large area in the back of our building - my bench was a good 30 yards from the door. When the quake hit, we all went under the benches to wait it out. But a few seconds after we’d done so, the door from the front office burst open, and the new guy came running out - cartoon-like, with his chest forward and arms thown back. He didn’t even break stride as the door hit the wall and bounced, but sprinted for the exit door, 25 or 30 yards away. Luckily for him it had a crash bar - he hit it in the same attitude he’d hit the inner door. Though I suspected he might have burst through anyway, even if it was steel-clad hardwood.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human as terrified as he was during his sprint.
Those reflexes last a long time, too! I think we’d been in NC about five years when a lightening strike outside the office I was in caused the building to shake. I was under the nearest table with my infant daughter before you could say “boo!”…and everyone else was looking at me like I was totally insane!
That’s quite possible. The New Madrid quake was centered in a relatively unpopulated area, but was felt as far east as Washington DC. “Most damaging” and “largest” aren’t always the same thing…if a big quake is centered in an unpopulated area, it might not do much damage (depending on what’s in its way…quakes create “ripples” like dropping a stone into water), or it might do a lot…it kinda depends on what’s in its path and what kind of ground it’s sitting on.
For example, the Loma Prieta quake was centered a few miles south of Santa Cruz, but caused extensive damage as far away as San Francisco (about 70 miles). That was a much smaller quake than the New Madrid, which I believe was a 9.
well a lot of how destructive quakes are depends on the bedrock, as well.
Unfortunatly, obvservation stations for seismic activity weren’t around in 1886 and I don’t think the richter scale was either so it’s hard to tell exactly how “big” that quake was. It did do a hell of a lot of structural damage, cause sinkholes and killed about 60 people, if memory serves me. I do know it was reported as being felt as far away as cuba and chicago…
Pretty wild, eh? Felt like my house was doin’ the Riverdance thing across the front yard. I guess it’s pretty routine for you guys on the west coast, but it’s really unusual around here.
Oh yeah, I got the hell scared out of me at 4:00 this morning!
It takes a lot to wake me up, but this morning’s quake shook my bed hard enough to make me think somebody was in my bedroom doing it.
I sleep with ear plugs in because of my noisy and inconsiderate neighbors, so I didn’t hear the rattling windows that went along with it, but it was still a very rude awakening!
Was that quake you felt part of the New Madrid system.
One time the New Madrid Fault was so severe that it made the Mississippi River run backwards for three whole days!
Aftershocks caused chimneys to fall for the next three years thereafter.
New Madrid is due for a big one, hopefully it will just simmer and keep letting off pressure little by little like it normally does.
My sweet birds are traumatized; Bard was flapping around so hard, he lost a feather that turned into a bleeder… poor wee thing. I guess it was a 4.5 centered near the Georgia/Alabama border, from what’s being reported on the news.
There was a really low “hum” of sorts, and the shaking lasted a good 30 seconds. My pictures on the wall are a bit skewed, but that’s about all that happened. My birds and cat are finally calmed down-- took the birds a while to stop huffing and puffing and flapping. Turns out Bard had a bleeder on each of his wings… I’m just glad the bleeding stopped on its own. Had me a bit worried.
Glad you’re O.K.