All Shook Up

Here's Paul today, when I caught up with him at the golf course. After his morning at golf camp, he was playing several holes on the course with his friend when the 5.8 earthquake centered in Virginia hit early this afternoon. He was quite unaffected by it. "Hey, that's cool, the ground just shook," the two boys said to each other, and played on.

Ben was equally undisturbed. He was on the riding mower mowing the yard and didn't feel anything except the usual throbbing of the engine.

Ben was home because a workman was there doing the fall servicing of our furnace. He was in the basement when he felt the shaking and saw the water in the basement fish tank "sloshing." Feeling quite scared, he found Ben, and in all seriousness asked if our house had a history of ghosts or poltergeists. I wonder when he realized that he had felt an earthquake.

I was in the school computer lab working on some training exercises with other school staff when I felt the roof and floor shaking. I wondered if there were workmen on the roof. Just as someone asked "Does anyone feel the building shaking?" the thought hit me that it was an earthquake. It went out just as quickly as I told myself that we don't get earthquakes around here.

And then the floor under me felt like it was rolling for a few seconds and the walls seemed to move and I thought "It is an earthquake!"

I jumped up and headed for the doorway thinking that would be a safe place to be, but people crowded behind me and forced me into the hallway. I stood there a few seconds trying to think of what you were supposed to do in an earthquake. As I looked at the cinder block walls in the hall I suddenly had a vision of them collapsing on me, and I headed out into the parking lot, where I joined several colleagues who were already there.

At first no one said much; I think we were all absorbing what had happened. Then we started talking about whether it really was an earthquake and describing what we had felt. People with cell phones tried to make calls but weren't getting through. I was struck with a remembrance of September 11th; it, too, was a beautiful day; on it, too, it was hard to get calls through or to know for sure what had happened.

Finally people began to get info from texts. Yes, it was definitely an earthquake, felt up and down the east coast. After a while cell calls began going through again. We were called back into the school, where our training was quickly wrapped up for the day.

The local news station is calling this a "Once-in-a-century quake." I sure hope so; once in my lifetime was enough!