Earthquake

As I said elsewhere, the thing about that earthquake was that there were workers pruning trees around the power lines across the street and I thought that they had either snagged the line to the house or had somehow dropped the bucket from the truck on our roof. Either was unlikely to make the house shake the way it did but those were the immediate possibilities.

There are a lot of people talking about how this was not a very big earthquake. It wasn’t. But the ground around here is one big rock and it transmits the energy very well. When a truck hits a bump two miles away the house shakes. Also, houses in my part of the country were not built with earthquakes in mind. My house is old, and though it is pretty solid, it wasn’t meant to endure this sort of thing.

The house shook, the walls undulated, the floor was bouncing up and down and the roof was shaking in rolling waves. Furniture shook, shelves were swaying back and forth and things on the walls were banging about.

Maybe 5.9 isn’t a really big earthquake, but it moved a lot of things around here. Not knowing it was an earthquake I thought something had hit the house and was rolling around on the roof – and somehow making the shelves I was standing next to shake back and forth by almost a foot while I literally bounced up and down as the floor moved. I was outside checking the condition of the house before I knew it was an earthquake and things were still swaying.

As far as I know we’re fine – no apparent damage – but there are reasons to be concerned about this and not make light of it just because those stupid easterners aren’t used to earthquakes. It’s because this is rare that it is something to think about. The last earthquake of this magnitude in the east was in the 19th century. Cities built in the 20th century aren’t made to stand up to that.

Now that it’s over we’ll hear all the jokes. Apparently no one was hurt, but there was damage to buildings and I was worried about the integrity of my own house. I am thinking about getting someone out to inspect the place. It may not seem like that big a deal to some people, but think about your own house being subjected to more stress than it was built to withstand. All things are relative and this was a relatively big deal.