Small earthquake in our area.

[CitizenKate]

The funniest earthquake story I remember (if there is anything humorous about earthquakes) happened when my mom was visiting my brother in San Diego, sometime during the late '70's. She was driving around town in her Toyota, waiting at a stoplight, when all of a sudden her car started shaking and rattling. She was very alarmed because she thought there was something wrong with her car. When she looked around at the other cars, and saw them shaking too, she happily rode out the quake knowing there was nothing wrong with her car. As I remember, it was a fairly powerful quake (big enough to make the news), which caused a fair amount of property damage.

Incidently, the USGS has a web site that offers a lot of interesting statistics, including a map of earthquakes occurring within the last week. You can see California, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico just littered with little quakes, then there's that big one out in Illinois, along with a couple of fairly powerful aftershocks. You can see it here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/.

Kate

[zman7458]

yep, it woke me up. at first I thought it was the dog running through the house ( its an old house and shakes if I sneeze hard) but there was no pitter patter of puppy feet, then I thought maybe I was in t he middle of a full blown poltergiest manifestation (two teenage boys in the house and thats about all that we haven't experienced with them <grin>). then I figured it had to be a quake, it's funny how your mind works when just waking up to something like that, my wife said she had the same thoughts about what it was when it woke her too. the after shock freaked me a little tho, I was on a 8 foot ladder right next to 2 large air handler ducts that ran for about 50 feet down the hall of the school we're working on. there was 2 pipe fitters working at the opposite end from me and all of a sudden the 2 ducts started dancing around like crazy. I thought the guys at the other end were shaking them, but when I looked down to see what they were doing, they were looking back at me probably thinking the same thing. thats when I got down from the ladder and found out we had just had an aftershock, boy they named that right!

[K-Man]

Speaking of odd happenings during an earthquake...during the 8.2 earthquake I went through, there was a lot of damage. However, in one instance there was a goblet that fell to the tiled floor and didn't break. There was a lot of rolling around, which included the cabinets. The goblet got lodged up underneath a corner of one of the cabinets. Had to break the goblet to dislodge it from its location....go figure.

[LarryB]

I got woke up from the earthquake. We are across the river from St Louis, mo. Really rattled things pretty good. I thought it was wind when I first woke up then I knew what was going on. No damage and fell back to sleep after I knew what it was... Made for an interesting day lol