I guess if I had ever lived on the West Coast, this wouldn’t have been a new thing. But, I was quickly awaken this morning a little after 5:30 am EST to shaking in our house.
I jumped right out of bed and started to look around. My first thought was, “Is Eric home?” (because I didn’t really realize what time it was at that time). He came running up stairs to see if everything was okay (he was getting ready for work). He said he thought maybe it was a very strong wind, since he had put his hand on our sliding glass door when it was happening and felt it shaking. (Perhaps not a smart move, in retrospect.)
After I kind of composed myself, my first statement was, “I think it was an earthquake, Eric.” (This is only because I know about the New Madrid fault line. I have never actually felt an earthquake before, as I was out of state when the 5.0 earthquake on that fault line happened in 1987.) But, then we turned on the news right away, and nobody was saying anything about it, so I thought it had to be wrong. But, a few minutes later, they finally announced that it had been a 5.4 magnitude earthquake.
I thought none of the kids woke up, but after they got up for school and we talked about it, Jack said it had awake him, but he thought it was rain.
They have now downgraded the earthquake to a 5.2 magnitude and they mapped the epicenter as West Salem, Illinois. Jack noticed right away that they showed St. Louis on the map as having felt it, and so this led to a perfect discussion of how powerful earthquakes can be. Since we just made an approximately five hour drive to St. Louis, I was able to point out that we felt it AND our friends in St. Louis felt the very same earthquake.
So, it sounds like there was no major damage, and hope that all my friends around the blogosphere in the middle section of the country are all fine.
Oh, and that nobody thinks that we should continue to use earthquakes in lieu of alarm clocks.
(ETA: Apparently Noah was the only one that didn’t wake up with the earthquake. When I got Molly out of bed, she told me about the “thunder” that scared her. Apparently she, like Jack, just went right back to bed though. Go figure!)
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