I was writing in my office at school when, around 1:51 yesterday, the building and my desk with the built in bookshelf started shaking. Hard. Back and forth for thirty seconds. My mind went just blank, and when I gathered my wits, right at the time it was over, I realized, Earthquake!
I have never experienced one of those and have always been kind of paranoid about it, mildly worried whenever I set foot in California. I had heard from my California friends that they went through them all the time, that they were usually just mild ripples. This was no mild ripple! It was a hard long shake. It turned out to have been 5.9 on the Richter scale, no less, with an epicenter of around 100 miles away from us in central Virginia. We are close to Washington, D.C., where I’m told people downtown rushed into the street and the Pentagon and White House were evacuated. The quake was felt for hundreds of miles, including in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, where JFK airport was shut down. And yet there seems to be no damage to speak of and no one hurt. (If you hear reports otherwise, please report them in a comment.)
Some of you readers must have felt it too. If you did, please report and give your location. Let’s see if we can calculate how far this thing reached.
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