Event nc51171759

Posted on June 15, 2006 by Gene

Well, that was fun — earthquake!

For the last year here in California, I’ve been questioning every rumble I hear, every queasy feeling, and every slight vibration. Usually, it turns out to be a truck going by or loud water pipes.
But just a few minutes ago, I was half asleep when my bed swayed back and forth — at first, I thought it was the dog scratching an itch; I looked around to see if anything else was swaying, but with the ceiling fan on the curtains and the like were already billowing. Still, I had a niggling feeling that this time it wasn’t the usual suspects.
The internet comes to the rescue! Picking up my laptop, I opened it to find an email already waiting from the USGS: a 4.7 earthquake 30 miles southeast of here.
It wasn’t that exciting, really. Ironically, it felt exactly like the earthquake we had back in Virginia a few years ago. Who knew that living in Virginia would train me to recognize an earthquake?
(That waveform at the top of this post is from this morning’s earthquake, taken from the closest USGS seismometer to my house. Ain’t the internet cool?)