I think we just had an earthquake.
UPDATE: My landlady felt it, too. Two waves. My chair was vibrating and my shelves shook.
UPDATE: Cell phone networks overloaded, can’t make calls. Oh, it was a 5.9 in Virginia that we felt here. Lots of buildings being evacuated (our buildings aren’t made for earthquakes), lots of breathless coverage on the local teevee.
Only 0.6 miles deep, according to earthquake.gov. As I’ve mentioned before, our earthquake faults are on granite and shocks carry farther. If we ever get a big one here, it will do serious damage.
I don’t see you on IRIS, but I see Colorado, with a 5.5.
Me, too. I’m in northern NJ. My chair was rolling back and forth a little.
5.8 in Virginia!
Not normal!
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/at00lqe6x3.php
Woodside, Queens (NYC) here. A little while ago, my computer desk shook a bit, a stack of VHS tapes moved, I felt something while sitting in my office chair…
monkeyfister: thanks for the link.
Susie: I’m glad I decided to check you just now.
NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/us/24quake.html?hp
I ran a quick search and found that we had a 5.9 here in California in June of 2010 and I don’t even remember it. I can understand why you’re rattled, but remember this is not a big earthquake. A few loosened bricks in chimneys seems the most likely damage. Watch for any loose bricks above your head. If you’re driving during an earthquake, it feels like you’re having a flat tire. And aftershocks are common but usually much less strong than the original event.
The difference here is, we have a lot of 110-year-old + buildings and most of them are stone and brick. They weren’t built for earthquakes. A 5.9 in Cali isn’t like here because we are on granite.
Structures built on bedrock are as less risk of catastrophic failure in an earthquake. All faults are in crustal rocks, mostly granitic. What matters is the substrate upon which the buildings are built, clay, gravel, bedrock. In terms of transmitted energy (which does the damage) it matters less the type of crustal rock than it does how connected that rock is to and it’s distance from the epicenter. Certain soils liquefy when shocked with a seismic wave. The brick and stone buildings are a real problem in the east and some of them are hundreds of years old, so don’t you cali types go thinking this is something to be blase about.