Earthquake!

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So my hubby has some kind of super-sense, except that it's often way off-base. He sees Brett Favre in the supermarket (not), hears wolves howling (not -- unless they were HofT's dogs, but that's a long story), and hears a flock of parrots in our oak tree (to my amazement, true.)

The super-sense goes into high gear when he's stressed, and he's WAY stressed lately. (Work stuff, deadlines.) So when he woke me up last night and said "it was an earthquake! I swear it was an earthquake!" I a) thanked him, b) woke up enough to realize that he was serious, c) rolled my eyes and went back to sleep.

Well, it was an actual earthquake in here in the Midwest:

Earthquake!

4.5 magnitude and everything!

Quote:

CHICAGO - A brief earthquake struck the Midwest early Monday, rattling windows and awakening sleeping residents from Wisconsin south to Missouri and from Indiana west to Iowa.

No injuries were reported from the quake, which occurred about 1:11 a.m. CDT.

Brian Lassige, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (news - web sites) in Colorado, said the quake was magnitude 4.5, and its epicenter was about eight miles northwest of Ottawa in northern Illinois, close to the small village of Troy (news - web sites) Grove. The rural area is about 70 miles west of Chicago.

Initial reports indicated no major damage from the temblor, although police agencies and radio stations within the quake area were inundated with telephone calls.

"It was mayhem around here for a while," said Pattie Burke, a dispatcher for the Ottawa Police. "We had more than 200 calls from residents in a short period of time, all of them wanting to know what had happened. A lot of them seemed to think a truck had crashed into their house.

"Here in the station, it felt like an aircraft was about to crash right here."

I'm bummed that I missed it.

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Wow. Has he sensed anything else like that?

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It was more my LACK of sense (still don't get why) -- a 4.5 temblor can be felt pretty easily!! (And we're not that far away from the epicenter.)

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wow, how often does Chicago(?) get earthquakes?

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You are the mother of a small and active child with high creativity. She embarks on suicidal actions at least once a day. Did no one ever mention that when you sleep the sleep of the just, you will probably miss local earthquakes?

Personally, at my age, I'd rather have all natural disasters at second hand.

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It can't be very often!

Huh, found this, more than I expected:

http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/general/seismicity/us_cen.html

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My friends in St.Louis once told me that their city was seriously damaged in a 19th century earthquake. This may be just an urban legend, but if it's a fact, it shows that earthquakes can get quite nasty even in the Midwest.

Glad you caught a harmless one, Soz!

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<edit>

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Re: Earthquake!

sozobe wrote:

I'm bummed that I missed it.

You're lucky your husband is earthquake sensitive.

A friend of mine always said "I'm bummed that I missed it", or something like that, after every earthquake.
He felt like an outcast.
Until our Big One in '85.
He was asleep and his whole library fell over him.
He got away with minor contusions.
Had he been in another part of the city, he would have not survived.

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I was in about 4 earthquakes of varying intensity when I was in L.A., I felt all of those! Hubby said this was different, less of an "edge" to it, more general and diffuse.

What did you feel, Cinn?

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I had just moved to So Cal a few months before the Northridge earthquake hit. I remember waking up in my bed to the shaking, thinking, 'Gee, that must be an awfully big truck.' My next thought was, 'No, wait, I'm in California, it must be an earthquake. Those happen all the time here.' And so I rolled over and went back to sleep.

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Wow! Where were you? (A friend of mine was near the epicenter -- she lived in an apartment complex that surrounded a pool, and the pool sent up a tsunami two stories high. Shocked

)

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Lots of shaking going on lately, it seems.

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I was in San Diego; not much damage there.

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Hmmm - I was seeing a client in my office one night when a quake struck - very definite shaking and rumbling, which moved a chair in the room until it bumped up against my chair - client thought I had gone mad when I commented thet the earthquake was over.

Perhaps it is Maslow's hierarchy of needs? - you needed sleep and she needed catharsis more than either of you needed to know about earthquakes.

While my skin is dearer to me than her words were.....

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Re: Earthquake!

fbaezer wrote:

sozobe wrote:

I'm bummed that I missed it.

You're lucky your husband is earthquake sensitive.

A friend of mine always said "I'm bummed that I missed it", or something like that, after every earthquake.
He felt like an outcast.
Until our Big One in '85.
He was asleep and his whole library fell over him.
He got away with minor contusions.
Had he been in another part of the city, he would have not survived.

Hmmmmm - dunno - I'd probably rather sleep through it - live or die - than go through all the panic and the running about of trying to save myself and others, when I mightn't anyway...

Then again I might ..... hmmmm....

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sozobe wrote:

What did you feel, Cinn?

Just a few seconds of low level rumbling shakiness. Dogs slept through it.

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Re: Earthquake!

dlowan wrote:

I'd probably rather sleep through it - live or die - than go through all the panic and the running about of trying to save myself and others, when I mightn't anyway...

I take it there are no earthquakes in Australia.

There's a parking lot a couple of blocks away from my working place.
There used to be a building there.
It fell apart in 1985.
I knew two people who died there.
One, Rockdrigo Gonzalez, was a rock singer/composer. The ceiling fell on him on his sleep.
The other one, Manuel Altamira, was a crime reporter. He didn't "go through all the panic and the running about", but did manage to get up his bed and look for "shelter" under the door frame.
When they found his body, it was standing up, it was purple and had a small scar -something hit him on the forehead-, a small injure. He wasn't crushed, but trapped by the walls and died of asphyxia, after about three days.

During an earthquake you don't panic, you don't run around. You gather your most important belongings (documents, not your PC!) and, as orderly as you can, move to open space.

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I experienced two earthquakes of comparable magnitude, one in Constance as a child, one in Munich while studying. Both cities are within a 1 hour drive of the Alps, where the African plate hits the European plate, so earthquakes of moderate magnitude are fairly common in both places.

The one in Constance felt like it feels when my bike hits the curbstone. A sudden shock, but it was over after a fraction of a second. The one in Munich felt wave-like, as if I'm suddenly on a ship at sea. It lasted longer -- I'd say for about three seconds, but your memory can play tricks on you in a situation like this.

In both cases, I fell asleep again shortly afterwards, and didn't consciously realize what had happened until the next morning.

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I have experienced two earthquakes as well (there has been one with 4.2 in South-West Germany/North Switzerland last night): the first near Cologne, the second in South Germany

At the first, I noticed books dancing on the table - but never thought of an earthquake.
Some years later, I seemed to be used to it - didn't care about :wink:

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Earthquake!

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