Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Earthquake wrap-up


Calm morning
Yesterday’s earthquake was a surprise but once everyone figured out it wasn’t caused by something terrible at nearby Three Mile Island, people around here settled down and got back to business as usual.

When I came back to my desk after the earthquake I looked at the USGS earthquake site to see how big the quake was and where it was centered. When I saw a quake down in Virginia, for a few moments I thought my quake hadn’t shown up yet. I simply couldn’t believe that a quake centered 200 miles away could be felt so strongly here. I thought the center was going to be somewhere very nearby.

At the cabin, nothing appeared damaged or fallen. I found a few cockeyed pictures on the walls, but they might have been like that before the quake. I tend not to notice things of a household nature all that much. Dog was about half wound up but he’d been flirting with bad behavior for a day or more, so that might not have been from the earthquake either.

The earthquake made for a good topic of conversation but fortunately this area didn’t sustain any damage or injury. The last time this area had such a strong earthquake was back in 1944. For my 85-year old father, this was his first experience of one, since he was over in the European Theater in 1944.

I did notice yesterday that deer were out in the fields in the middle of the day in more than a few places. I have no idea if the earthquake had anything to do with that, either, though it is unusual to see them then instead of around dusk or dawn.

All in all we did fine. I just hope we don’t have any more.

1 comment:

Scott said...

The reason one of my part-time employees knew we were having an earthquake was that the neighborhood dogs all started howling in unison, so Dog's response may not be just built-up antsy-ness.