Thursday, August 03, 2006

Mom Shakes

Woo-hoo! We were just sitting down to dinner about 8:10 tonight when I felt the floor tremble. I asked Corby, "Did you feel that earthquake?" He didn't, but he did hear the floor creak, like someone stepping on a creaky board. The 11 o'clock news said the earthquake occured at 8:08 pm PDT and was centered in Glen Ellen in Sonoma County, maybe an hour from here. It was a 4.4, followed by three smaller aftershocks about 25 minutes apart. Map and other details here. If you track your mouse over each different zip code, you can see how many people responded; ours is 94901, with 145 responses, intensity III.

I'm excited by earthquakes. Luckily, all I've experienced so far haven't been all that severe. I was way up in Nevada County up in the Mother Lode when the Loma Prieta quake occurred in 1989 so didn't feel it.

I felt a couple when I lived in North Beach back in the 1970s. Once I was sitting in the bathtub and when the quake hit, the water sloshed around; it sloshed around in the nearby toilet, too. When they happened, people would come outside their front doors and look around and ask each other if we felt it. That was way before the Internet with its near-instant official USGS data.

1 comment:

Chas S. Clifton said...

Glen Ellen, you say. And I've had Jack London on my mind all weekend. It all fits together, I tell you!