Shake Rattle Rumble

It was almost 1400 yesterday when my desk started to shake. Then just as I thought it was finishing, it really started to shake and the windows were rattling. There was a low rumble. My supervisor said "what the-?" And I said "this is an earthquake." And he said "we should probably get away from the window?" And then it was done.

So we learned that the epicenter was in Mineral VA, spitting distance from the VA Renaissance Faire grounds and the North Anna Nuclear Power Station, about 80 miles from the office. It registered 5.8 on the Richter Scale. According to an expert at the US Geological Survey, it was the strongest VA quake since a 5.6 in 1897. This one was felt in parts of NC and as far north as VT.

At around 2000 last night, there was a 4.2 aftershock. It was nothing like the first quake.

This map of US fault lines and earthquake hazard zones came from the US Geological Survey.

Quakes are very uncommon in this area. I've experienced four over the past eight years and none that I can recall prior to that. VA has far more seismic activity than MD, and I've been working in VA for the past eight years, so that makes some sense. Nothing has really been big enough to rattle much through MD before that, I guess. Or I just didn't know what it was.

The very first quake I felt was a 4.5 in 2003. It wasn't that far from yesterday's epicenter, and it shook the office in McLean for a few seconds. The second was shortly after I bought my home. There was a very brief rattle in the wee hours of a Friday morning. I don't even know the magnitude or epicenter of that one, it was by far the mildest of the four I have felt. Hmm, a quick internet search tells me that one was a 3.6 and it was centered just north near Gaithersburg MD. It wasn't the mildest earthquake I've felt after all, but circumstances made the next one pretty bad. It was a magnitude 3 and it happened while Pat and I were riding a roller coaster at King's Dominion last October. We were a mere 3 miles from the epicenter of that quake. It was the worst roller coaster ride ever, and left us both with the mother of all migraines, though we didn't know until a few days later that it was a quake.

In every case but the third (because I was on a roller coaster), I knew it was an earthquake.

It was business as usual in the office following the quake, though no one was really focused on work. I heard a building was evacuated across the street from us, but we were not, though the entire call center left the building. We were jostled quite a bit, and I had a headache and my back and neck were sore. It was kind of like someone was shaking the building as if trying to get the last coins out of a piggy bank.

At home, I found two very worried kitties who clung to me through the night. One plastic bottle fell off a shelf in the bathroom and a shell fell off my altar in the bedroom. Otherwise, you really couldn't tell that anything had happened. The kitties jumped at every noise, or looked at me for a reaction, and I tried very hard not to jump with them (though I think I looked out the window when I heard a car go by far more often than normal). The aftershock was brief and the cats stayed close. They sat with me on the bed for story time and stayed with me through the night. Poor things looked quite forlorn when I left the house this morning.

A lot of people were joking about the whole thing in the hours that followed, because it was mild in comparison to other earthquakes but disrupted the region quite a bit anyway. The worst part of the whole mess, and why I find no humor in it, was the amount of people who were in town when the quake happened thinking "this is it, this is the attack we've been fearing would happen for almost 10 years." I think DC is perfectly in rights to be jumpy. While it turned out to be nothing more than a large (for the area) earthquake, a good deal of the nerve-rattling was from memories and fears.

We all have enough to be worried about.

Next up! Hurricane Irene! She might be headed our way!