The Baby Quake

As we all know by now there was an “earthquake” that tickled the East Coast today.  According to reports I’ve seen online the epicenter was a 5.8 or so with tremors reaching from 2.5 to 3.5 depending on the proximity.

I’m essentially 10 miles from New York City, and NYC is easily 250 miles from the Virginia/Washington DC area.  So if I had to guess I think we had a 3.0 rating.

Anyways, to say that people were hysterical and panicking is an under-statement.  It might have been one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life.  I had to educate people in their 30s, 40s and 50s that it’s going to be okay. People had looks on their faces like they heard gun-fire, it was a ghostly pale stare.  I even heard a few people say that we need to evacuate now. It seriously felt like I was in the 1950s and they found out that Cuba was going to launch nuclear missiles.  Not to be taboo but I would dare say that some people were 9/11 like terrified.  Now I’m not in a 100 story high-rise where those feelings might have been a little scarier, I’m in a one-story 30,000 sq. foot brick building that wouldn’t move if you had 3 bulldozers moving at 75 mph run into it.

With the “quake” happening around 2-3 pm eastern time that left for plenty of time for everyone to squawk about it the rest of the day.  I slept through the Northridge earthquake back in 1994 that was a 6.7.  57 people died in that earthquake and more than 8,700 were injured.  Shouldn’t people out here feel a little foolish for making a big deal about nothing?  Shouldn’t they be ashamed to think that a tiny shake of a building is as scary as a real earthquake?  Couple that with the fact that Japan just featured terrible natural disasters of a tsunami and a 9.0 quake one of the biggest ever recorded.  Over 15,000 people died in that.  I would be shocked if 15,000 people even had an increased heart rate from this earthquake.

Put it this way, when I came home from work nothing was out-of-place, everything was still on the bookcase and all the pictures were on the wall.  If nothing fell it’s not an earthquake, it’s the earth trying to get more comfortable.  Kinda like when you’re sitting in a car for a really long drive and you adjust yourself to a new position, that’s what happened today.