Earthquake

No fun or funny images of earthquake damage, I'm afraid. I was chatting with our HR director, who had just returned from a trip home to Grenada. As she updated me on all the things she did in three weeks (which I never managed to do in my three months or so there), we started to look at each other to figure out whether the other was feeling the weird sensation of movement. A third person in the lunch room broke the silence and asked if it was an earthquake. I said that if it was, it should last in the neighborhood of a thirty seconds, unlike something dropping or blowing up or something.

Then - now this is really cool - I felt the floor start moving in a different direction. I couldn't tell you what the new direction was, but it was definitely a DIFFERENT direction. For example, at first it was going up and down, then it switched to being left to right. That confirmed to me that it was an earthquake because earthquakes actually have three different sets of waves that shake you, some more damaging than others. This was something I had learned while researching my new school program on waves (earthquakes are waves that move through the Earth's surface and can be modeled like ocean or sound waves - for a fun demo at home, check out "Dynamic Earth - Tsunami"). Even for the earthquake in England, which was the first I had felt, I hadn't felt this change in direction thing. So it was pretty cool. Being this far away from the epicenter (somewhere in Virginia), we didn't see any damage at home or at work. Just some pretty creeped out coworkers and folks in general.

I think the funniest thing about the earthquake was all the discussion we had with our safety manager on staff at the next all staff meeting. We informally assessed which parts of the building shook the most, discussed what we should do in case of another strong earthquake (to evacuate or not to evacuate, that was the question), etc. We spent almost an hour on it. However, we spent zero time talking about the PREDICTABLE natural disaster scheduled to hit us later in the week - Hurricane Irene. Preparations for that didn't really get squared away until less than 48 hours before she hit. But that's the subject for another post.