A Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On!
I guess most have heard the news of the 5.2 magnitude earthquake that shook the Central U.S. early Friday morning at 4:36AM. The epicenter of the earthquake was about 150 miles from me in Southern IL. The quake was strong enough to wake me up out of a deep sleep. I thought someone was shaking the bed and it wasn’t me. My first thought having been still part asleep was this house needed a firmware upgrade and a reboot to fix it. You have to know that yesterday I spent the biggest part of the day upgrading server firmware. OK, so I was crazy just a little bit. But, after I started to come around, I heard stuff rattling in the house. Then, I thought this is the BIG ONE! I should lay here and just listen. The shaking stopped. Everything was quiet outside except for a few sirens. I guess it was alarms going off. I made it unharmed.
To confirm that what I just encountered was an earthquake, I quickly turned on the news and ran all the stations. Not a word at 4:40AM in the morning. I would have to wait until my local news came on at 5:00AM to be reassured that my experience was in deed an earthquake. The local news is a whole other story for another day. But, when they talked to some guy via phone as a witness to the event in Southeast Missouri and he was describing the shaking. I decided it was time to go back to sleep.
This was only the second quake that I remember feeling. The first was the 4.6 New Hamburg quake on September 26, 1990 during the time of Iben Browning’s prediction. I was a Junior at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau in Academic Hall when it hit and scared us to death. This is when we all were making earthquake kits and taping up our windows waiting for the BIG ONE. Well, I hope the BIG ONE will wait at least another century before it hits.
Read: Earthquake rattles Illinois
Read: Ode to Iben Browning: Ten Years After
[...] Drew Hill [...]
America’s North Shore Journal | Earthquake in Illinois
April 18, 2008 at 10:26 am