Earthquake

I woke up at 4am and the house was shaking. I could hear a vibrating noise, and everything was rattling. It seemed to go on forever as I struggled to rouse myself from that deep sleep stupor and figure out what was happening. Rob was still sound asleep. As the shaking continued, I realized we must be having an earthquake. It could have been seconds, minutes or hours later that the shaking stopped, and then I lay there awake, in sort of a panic—thinking about my dissertation, the class I’m teaching, the new microbe opportunity SL just told me about (more on that some other day), etc. Waking up in a panic at 4am is nothing new for me; waking up with the house rattling isn’t something that happens too often.

A few hours later the alarm went off, and I mumbled incoherently to Rob that I thought we’d had an earthquake in the night. “Maybe it was an elephant going by our house,” he quipped, in reference to the circus which is apparently in town. But a few minutes later he got online and saw the emails and news stories, and sure enough, there had been an earthquake.

According to the News Gazette, it was a 5.2 earthquake centered near West Salem, IL and just 66 miles from Evansville, IN (where Grandpa and Grandma B live). That’s 140 miles away from us. The earthquake was strong enough to make the skyscrapers in Chicago sway (230 miles away) and was felt as far as Cincinnati, and Atlanta.

There was one time shortly after we moved in (during the fall of 2007) that I woke up to the same thing in the middle of the night, sure we were having an earthquake. But I never did find any news stories about it. Maybe that time, it really was an elephant going by. This time though, it looks like it was an earthquake for sure.