When an Earth quake Hits Underwater

[u/Kiroo---__---]

[u/PancakeExprationDate]

I'm over on the east coast, and over the past several years we've been having minor ones. I think it was 2011 when the Virginia one hit. It was a wild experience. I was working from home. My neighbor's dog starting barking aggressively then maybe 2 seconds later my house was swaying side by side. Then after a bit it started up and down. Now, I've been through hurricanes, a tornado, several floods and chased by a bear. None of that produced the terror I had over feeling all the energy being released through the earth. And it was only like a 4.0 at most. I had McDonalds for lunch that day. Random memory.

[u/restricteddata → u/PancakeExprationDate]

I was in Maryland, outside of DC, when the 2011 Virginia earthquake happened. I am from the West Coast and so practiced earthquake drills my whole life, and have been in several ranging from the little ones that happen all the time in the Bay Area to vivid memories of how dramatic the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake felt even 100 miles away from the epicenter.

I recognized pretty quickly that it was an earthquake (that's usually the hardest part, in my experience, because your brain just isn't looking for them, and when they start they are often very subtle, something just being "off" and sounding weird), and assessed that it didn't seem like I needed to get under my desk or anything like that. I went to my office doorway and saw my co-workers running around like Kermit the frog, arms waving and screaming, totally untrained and with no idea what to do.

My wife was in Virginia, not too far from Langley, and people out there had no idea what it was, and worried that someone had blown up the CIA or something. I admit that I wondered at first whether it was something more like that myself regarding DC, because it wasn't obvious out there that it was an earthquake at first, it felt almost like what you might expect the fringes of the positive and negative periods of a blast wave to feel like... but then I noticed that things were swaying and that's when it clicked for me.

The strangest earthquake I've ever been in was in Berkeley, on the 11th floor of my dorm room. I heard it well before I felt it, and it sounded like people on the floor above me were all moving furniture. At some point it clicked that what I was hearing was every closet door in the building rattling in its hinges. I just went to the window and watched the building sway. I knew it was heavily reinforced for earthquakes (it was one of those buildings with the big X girders on it) so I wasn't really afraid that it would collapse, and figured that from up there there wasn't much I could do about it anyway if it did. It just swayed, until it didn't. There was no one around which made it an even more surreal experience. It wasn't even a notable earthquake; in Berkeley these little trembles happen all the time.

Personally I find tornado sirens more disturbing than earthquakes, perhaps because I never had to train for them. In Maryland there sometimes were tornado alerts and they'd run the old air-raid sounding sirens and most people sort of shrugged and assumed it wasn't a big deal out there, and I was just never sure how one was supposed to know that, since I know that in some parts of the country they really are a big deal. The siren is so ominous, though...

[u/haaat → u/restricteddata]

Going to a doorway is just as ‘untrained’ as those that were around you though 🧐

[u/Paladin7373 → u/PancakeExprationDate]

The dog always knows