If you felt the earthquake last night, you can report it to the USGS, here:
One thought on “Tell USGS if You Felt the Earthquake”
I posted this comment on Abbot’s blog (“The Abbot of Unreason”), so why not here:
When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck in 1989, our kids were still teenagers living at home with us in Palo Alto.
My young daughter and I stood together in the kitchen doorway, bracing ourselves against the doorframe, with my arms enveloping her.
I had many seconds of cognitive dissonance, with two thoughts nearly overlapping, as the floor beneath our feet shifted back and forth over a distance that felt like at least a foot.
The two thoughts?
“This is kinda pleasant, like standing on a gently rocking waterbed.”
“Oh my God, there must be people dying out there under collapsing freeway overpasses and buildings.”
Indeed there were.
With the Loma Prieta quake, I heard it coming before we felt it. It sounded like a very low rumble, a train in our neighborhood (nowhere near a train track).
When I went back to work the next day at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of my colleagues described getting under a table on the concrete floor of the computer building, on his hands and knees.
He told me that he could feel the earthquake wave with his hands as it torqued through the concrete. Each of his hands rotated in a different plane, he said.
That’s always stayed in my memory as an image of the power of the quake.
The quake near Truckee last night woke me briefly, then I fell back asleep in seconds.
One thought on “Tell USGS if You Felt the Earthquake”
I posted this comment on Abbot’s blog (“The Abbot of Unreason”), so why not here: