What's shaking?
14Oh, it’s us.
5.7 magnitude earthquake just west of Salt Lake City at 7:09 this morning. No injuries (other than my knee, from diving under the desk), and minimal property damage. The SLC airport is closed though.
The epicenter was just a few miles from work. We felt it as rapid, sharp, violent jarring. It knocked small debris out of the rafters, but didn’t knock anything off of the benches or shelves, at least in my area. For a moment, my brain had a little trouble figuring out what was happening. 
Then I dove under the desk.
After the first few minutes of aftershocks, the evacuation alarm was triggered, and after milling around in the parking lot for a while, they decided to send us home. There’s a lot of interesting things used in various processes, from natural gas and hydrogen, to cyanide, so it makes a lot of sense to evacuate and check for damage.
My wife said it was more of a rolling feeling at home. She thought I was crawling back into bed, but nobody was there. A few things jumped off of shelves, and one landed on her keyboard, and entered a password about a mile long.
At 9am they were calling us back into work for noon. At 10am they told us to stay home.
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The Angel Moroni statue on top of the Salt Lake Temple lost his trumpet.
@blaineg Ah, there it is.
@blaineg As a fellow brass player, I feel for him.
Or maybe that’s the angel equivalent to a mic drop.
@mehcuda67 My dear, demented brother-in-law posted this:
Moroni: Should I blow it?
God: Not yet…
Moroni: I think I should blow it!
God: Nope!
Moroni: I’M BLOWING IT!!
God: sends earthquake and slaps trumpet out of his hands
@blaineg Between the virus and the earthquake, I think he squeezed out a couple of warmup notes first!
@mehcuda67 I had a weird thought on the way into work this morning:
“This concludes our test of the earthquake system, we now return you to our regularly scheduled crisis, already in progress.”
And there have been charlatans, liars, or fools making false postings on Facebook that the experts were forecasting a 9.0 “aftershock” later today.
What’s wrong with people?
@blaineg … I… Well… There’s too much to list
My fist at the rain.
Oh, earthquake? Sweet. Always a fun sensation. That microsecond of weightlessness kind of reminds me of elevators.
(San Diegan here.)
Long ago, I was perhaps a block and a half from the epicenter of the Northridge quake in 1994. It’s the only time I’ve been frightened in a quake.
Wikipedia says the epicenter was in Reseda, but (unless city boundaries have changed, it was Northridge. It was early in the morning, and when it started, my husband threw himself on top of me, in case anything fell on us. I felt air between me and the bed, and between the two of us.
Later in the day, my daughter was insistent that she had to go to work, and I finally gave in, and took her. (She worked at a Tower Records.) The door in was still there, but the building itself as perhaps five feet tall (or less). She finally looked in the door, and saw that the ceiling was on the floor, and admitted that there was no job to go to.
Fascinating video from Youtube that’s a group of news reports from KNBC (now called NBCLA).
@Shrdlu Everything I saw and heard about the Northridge quake was terrifying, I can only imagine what it was like to be in it.
@Shrdlu When I first came online back in 1996, one of the posters at Acmepet had lost her home to the Northridge quake.
@Shrdlu YIKES!!! That sounds really scary. No thank you. I want my catastrophes to give enough warning so I can run away. I don’t know how you folks get used to that threat hanging over your head.
Been way too near a few where you couldn’t run - mostly tornados, including once where a lightening ball surrounded my house as a water spout that went ashore landed in my backyard and then took out 10 about houses behind me - I was in the living room at the time, scared the crap out of the cats; another time was driving home and saw it out my window just barely behind me and marginally north and no place to head away from it for over a mile. I didn’t realize when I moved away from tornado alley just how much I had watched the sky every single time there was a thunder storm. But at least those you have some warning. Earthquakes no thanks (I’ve only been in two very mild ones and that is enough).
@Kidsandliz @Shrdlu Have you seen four guys on horses?
@blaineg @Kidsandliz @Shrdlu
A couple of days after the Northridge quake, I ran into some locals, who at the time had been in Cal, in some LA hotel.
They’d spent most of their lives in Tx, and had no frame of reference for shaking ground. They had a “what’s going on” reaction, and went to the room windows, then saw water dancing and slopping out of the hotel swimming pool.
They said so many birds had taken flight out of the trees. That detail stuck, for some reason.
By the time they got to the “this is Cal. Maybe it’s an earthquake?” reaction, a fair time had elapsed. And they recalled feeling really stupid and mentally slow at that moment. They went to the front desk to confirm.
But now we have (mostly smallish) earthquakes around here, likely related to injection wells and the fracking industry. Altho I’m unaware of having ever felt one.
I wonder, in the instance, how long I’d take to figure it out?
@blaineg @f00l @Shrdlu Well I’d suspect that after this conversation you’d think of that even if it was just heavy construction equipment passing by LOL
@blaineg @f00l @Kidsandliz @Shrdlu I remember back in 1993 we had the “Spring Break Quake” in NW Oregon. It happened early in the morning and we were still asleep when I awoke to the sound of of the old wooden framed double hung windows rattling in the frame. At first, I thought a big truck had lumbered by on the road. By the time I even realized what was really going on, my wife had jumped out of bed, grabbed our infant daughter out of her crib and was standing in the doorway with her. Gotta respect those Mom instincts!
man… I thought the answer to “what’s shaking?” was going to be “bacon”.
false advertising!
@carl669 No, I’m sure the bacon was shakin, along with everything else.
What’s shaking? My Quarantinis.
Back in 2011 when the East coast had a pretty big earthquake I happened to be on vacation in the Outer Banks. As is the norm for a house right on the water there, the house was elevated on stilts. Our group was on the top floor when it hit. The entire sensation was rather strange, like the ground was rolling and the house swayed back and forth. Every other person in the house thought the wind had kicked up. It hit me rather quickly that it was actually an earthquake. I hopped online and immediately started seeing posts from friends back in PA about it and I couldn’t believe it was big enough that we all felt it over that much distance. Turns out the epicenter was in Virginia and it was felt all the way up to Canada. If I learned one thing that day, it’s that I’d prefer to never experience another earthquake in a raised house.
@cinoclav Reminds me of
@mehcuda67 Yup. At least I actually waited until the house was done shaking to hop online.
/youtube the cars shake it up