Earthquake last week!

[Randi]

Well I have been so busy getting kids off to camp (they work there) for the summer but I wanted to share my earthquake experience.
We live about 60km (40 miles) from the epicentre of last week's earthquake. Youngest DS and I were home and can honestly say we were terrified! The house shook for about 30 seconds and the whole experience was probably a minute from the beginning to the end. At first I thought it was a truck (one of my neighbours is putting in a pool) and then it was much too violent. DS yells OMG its an earthquake!! He realized it before me, I was just processing the whole thing. We ran outside and my entire street was outside! It was 1:40pm in the afternoon.
Honesty, I have never experienced anything like this and can only imagine what those poor people in Haiti went through.

[Andrea J.]

yikes
i saw the news report on it last week.
you were lucky indeed.
the news report spoke of the fault line and the minor tremors that hit the area often.
your quake was felt all the way into maine.

[rob o]

Heard about it down here in RI and were wondering how you did. Sorry I never got aroung to asking. Can I assume no damage and simply a learning experience?

[Randi]

We sit on a minor fault line that covers a few cities but we do get some minor tremours from time to time that you never feel. In the past 20 years this was the third one that people could actually feel, however, this one was bigger and very unusual for this area. It registered 5.0 and was felt in the Boston and NY area too. It went all the way to Windsor, Ontario which is close to Detroit.

In our area there was only minimal damage to three buildings. One is an school about 10 minutes from our house. The school is 43 years old. The worst was at the town where it was the epicentre as a wood bridge collapsed. The epicentre was in a rural area and other than the bridge they were pretty much unscathed. I can tell you it was scary.

Interesting, all the downtown core buildings evacuated. Not a good idea as if it was a large earthquake all the glass, etc would be projectiles and that would be a dangerous situation. We went outside since we live in the suburbs and not much around except houses and the trees are not that big. Learning experience for all even though this was a very rare occurance.

[sunnysmiles]

That earthquake was felt all the way over on the west coast of Michigan!
I'm glad nothing more serious resulted from it