Thursday, February 28, 2008

Earthquake!

I don't know if this has made news past the UK, but we had an earthquake the other night! It did wake me up, and the thought ran through my head that it sure seemed like an earthquake--but then I thought, in my half-asleep state, that of course it wasn't an earthquake--this is England, after all! I did wonder what the boys were doing to make the house seem to shake, though....

The Guardian article is here.

This earthquake is only the second I've experienced, and the second to occur in an area not particularly known for earthquakes (the first one I experienced was in Virginia in 2003). And even though the Virginia one occurred in the middle of the afternoon, I was asleep for that one, too!

4 comments:

An Briosca Mor said...

I remember that Virginia earthquake. I was sitting at my desk at work just about ready to leave for home when it felt like someone was rolling a big-ass pallet of stuff down the hallway outside my door. Either that or someone was using the hallway on the floor above for a bowling alley but they forgot to set up the pins so there was no satisfying pin crash at the end of the roll. Then I got in my car and heard them talking about an earthquake on the radio.

As I remember it, the quake was in the spring or early summer that year. Then a couple of months later there was the big East Coast blackout (which happened while I was in Ireland actually), and then Hurricane Isabel came through in September and knocked out the power for a couple of days. Strangely, though, despite the fact that these were each very unusual calamities for our area, I don't recall any of the Bible-thumpers down Lynchburg or Va Beach way predicting the Rapture or the Second Coming. Something else must have had them spun up at the time. Oh right, they were too busy worrying about bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, and probably figured that God would never let the world end before they had the chance to finish the job there.

Rob said...

Yow! This is the first I've heard of the earthquake! I'm glad you're ok. I missed the one in Virginia too.

T said...

Yeah, this one here wasn't any big deal--I think it was something along the lines of 4.7. The funny thing is that Philippa also thought that the boys in her house were raising a ruckus!

John, I think the VA earthquake was in the spring of 2003, because I was crashing at my mom's when it happened. The local news made a wild big deal of it, you can imagine!

mmmqq said...

As for that East Coast blackout, I was in Ecuador at the time. I really wish I'd kept a damn journal of that trip. I don't know how I always manage to convince myself that there's NO way I could forget the places I go and things I see. Now, you SMART people keep blogs of these things. Though I suppose since blogs didn't exist at the time, I can't really hold myself too accountable. *sigh*