This one was really minor. I live in Vancouver, WA but work in Portland, OR. Anyway, we felt a mild shake in the building about 10 minutes ago. I guess a 3.1 quake hit about 10mi north of here. No damage or injuries as far as I know. I lived in Seattle 2 years ago when that earthquake hit.. Man, that was something!
Ive been fortunate or unfortunate enough to be a part of almost every natural disaster: Blizzard - Denver (1983) Hurricane - Houston (Alicia - 1983) Earthquake - Los Angeles (1993) Tornado - Lubbock (1996) Dust Storm - Lubbock (bad one in 1997) Flood - Austin (July 2002 - house almost floated away)
Drewdog...where were you living during the Northridge Earthquake? I lived in Santa Monica at the time. That Monday was Martin Luther King's birthday, so I had the day off. Sunday night I went to the pub a couple of blocks from my apartment and drank a very large quantity of beer. Stumbled home at 2AM and crashed out on my bed with my clothes still on. At 4:30 AM the shizzznit hit the fan. A lightpole fell in our parking lot and missed my car by 5 feet. The convenience store at the end of the block lost one entire wall of their building. My neighbors and I were without electricity until 8PM, a total of 16 hours, so everyone lit their grills and we spent the day grilling defrosting meat and drinking beer that was getting warm. Watching the cars navigate the busy intersection at the end of the block while the stop lights were off was very entertaining.
Hurricane Alicia was WEAK...I was at my Grandma's apartment in La Marque, and we were standing out on the porch watching everything....took out trees more than anything...
I nearly lost everything when my apartment building collapsed. I was without power for 6 days. Weak my ass!
No problems with me.. Damn, Drewdog.... Remind me never to live in the same town you are in! I was in Houston for Alicia too, but besides the 2 earthquakes in the last 2 years, I've been fairly natural disaster free. (knock on wood)
I've always been really lucky with regard to natural disastors. I was out of town for Alicia, the San Antonio flood didn't hit me and the Bartlesville flood didn't hit us when I lived there. I've never been in an Earthquake or any other natural disaster. The closest are Tornados, but I've never been hit by one.
Drewdog, a tornado in Lubbock in 1996? When? I don't remember that at all! I remember Alicia coming through. The subdivision I lived in at the time was hit hard! We had to live in the Westin Galleria for a week. Allison killed my car. So that was the worst one for me.
That's so strange. I was in Portland until April first. Then I cam to LA. I wasn't worried about Earthquakes then, but I'm definitely trying to make myself aware of them here. I guess I had it backwards.
You got it FT! I was in the big city of Los Fresnos at the time too! It was my 14th birthday. We spent it in the dark with candles, but it was kinda nice! Besides flooding, our house made it through ok though.
Interesting that this was on the NYTimes Science Page this week... ___________________ 'Slow Quakes' May Lay Ground Work for Big Ones By CAROL KAESUK YOON BELLINGHAM, Wash., April 21 — This spring, as people in the Pacific Northwest have gone about their usual drizzly business, an earthquake has been going on for weeks beneath their feet, unbeknownst to everyone but a very few, very excited scientists. While this quake, which began in early March, lacks any bridge-collapsing punch, scientists say it is of great interest as the latest in a newly discovered cycle of highly regular earthquakes. This cycle is so regular that last year, scientists were willing to predict that the next one would hit the Northwest this spring, as it has. Perhaps even more important, scientists say these so-called slow quakes may play a role in setting off much more powerful earthquakes. The slow quakes can release as much energy over weeks as the Nisqually temblor that struck the region two years ago. Researchers have recently found evidence that slow quakes appear to have preceded huge earthquakes in Chile and Japan, suggesting that the subtle quakes could be a precursor to a devastating one in the Northwest. "It can be the straw that breaks the camel's back," said Dr. Anthony Qamar, a seismologist at University of Washington. "The silent quake could be sufficient to trigger it." These quakes are called by a variety of names, including slow quakes, silent quakes or silent slips. Researchers say they do not yet know why the silent quakes in the Northwest appear to be coming in such regular fashion, recurring every 14 1/2 months or so. The quakes are so hard to detect that while some researchers say the latest quake may still be going on, at least one researcher says it is not clear if this latest event, which was not actually expected until late April, has in fact begun. The difficulty is that the quakes are too subtle to be detected with the usual seismometers, which record the motion of a typical earthquake. Instead researchers first detected the slow quakes on a global positioning system, or G.P.S. While most people use G.P.S. instruments to identify a supposedly fixed location, these geologists use them to track how the land is slowly and continually moving. If one thinks of the earth as an egg covered by a cracked shell, then each bit of shell can be thought of as one of the oceanic or continental plates. Each plate slowly moves about on the earth's surface. In the Northwest just off the coast under the Pacific Ocean, one such oceanic plate, known as the Juan de Fuca plate, is bumping into and diving beneath the continental plate, which holds things like the state of Washington. To study how the continental plate is moving, researchers set up a network of G.P.S. stations and watched to see how their locations changed over time. The researchers found that the continental plate and the positioning monitors on them were moving slowly but continually, as expected, and were heading to the northeast. But the researchers noticed that sometimes some of the stations would suddenly shift and move in the opposite direction, to the southwest, just a few scant millimeters, for a few weeks. Eventually all of the monitors would return to their usual path until some 14 1/2 months later, then the instruments would temporarily shift southwest once again. A blip in the readings almost too small to notice, it turns out, was the signal of the silent quake. Researchers say the silent earthquakes are happening along the fault where the Juan de Fuca and continental plates are sliding past each other but far below the earth's surface, so far down that the plates are very hot and extremely plastic. "Once you get deep enough, things get so hot that the plates actually trundle past each other continuously," said Dr. Herb Dragert, research scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada. "But the plates can get hung up at those depths as well; then the stress accumulates, and when it gets released, that's what we call a slow earthquake." But all of this would be academic if it were not for the fact that higher along that fault — where those same two plates are cooler, crustier and closer to the surface — the Juan de Fuca plate and the continental plate are locked together, building up the energy and stress that when released will produce a devastating, megathrust earthquake in the region. Scientists say that when stress is released on one part of a fault — for example deep down where the slow earthquake happens — it can increase the stress elsewhere. "If the stress on the locked portion is close to being critical and getting close to the breaking strength of the rock," Dr. Dragert said, "then one of these small slips could be the agent, the last little push." People in the Northwest have long been urged to brace for the "big one." A megathrust earthquake along the fault between the Juan de Fuca and continental plates would qualify as such a catastrophe, as might a quake along a separate hazard, in the Seattle fault zone. But whether residents should be especially prepared for a megathrust earthquake every 14 1/2 months when another silent earthquake comes along, researchers say they do not know enough yet to say. "Should we go into a period of heightened awareness and preparation?" asked Dr. Meghan Miller, a geological researcher at Central Washington University. "That interests me. But I don't think we're quite there yet. We only just discovered all this last year." Looking over the past 10 years, researchers have found eight slow quakes in the region. If all goes as expected, Dr. Dragert said the next one should start moving the G.P.S. monitors to the southwest sometime in June 2004. But just how regular this cycle of slow quakes will be remains to be seen. Researchers caution that the most predictable-seeming earthquakes have fooled researchers. Along what is known as the Parkfield section of the San Andreas fault in California, Dr. Miller said, magnitude six earthquakes occurred every 20 years or so through much of the 1900's, so regularly that scientists made extensive preparations for a 1980 earthquake that never occurred. "We've spent a lot of time and energy to monitor this," Dr. Miller said. "And I think we're still waiting for the 1980 event."
Thanks for the CD BTW!!!! I love it that ya'll brought up Allen. He was a total prick. We lost our 38 foot yacht to Hurricane Allen. All I ever hear is what a puss storm it was.Well my little 8 year old mind thought he was ferocious. He sank our boat!
