WABASH CO.—Likely the residents of Wabash County didn’t notice this little shaker at all.
But something happened the night before that made US notice it.
At about 9 p.m. Wednesday, July 10, we were all getting ready to shut it down for the night when the entire house was hit by a “flash.” Everyone saw it except Ang. But that didn’t make any difference to her. She went into mitigation overdrive, and made sure there were no glasses on the counters, all counter doors were secure, everyone had their laptops, and earthquake shoes (light, but with good soles, in order to walk over glass if necessary) were next to everyone’s beds.
She was upset about feeling earthquake-y, as we had a berry day planned for yesterday:
That was screen shot this morning, about 7:30, 07.12.13. You can see it on her page here.
So we didn’t leave last night until about 6 p.m….and were so excited about going to see Toto in St. Louis that neither one of us checked the USGS page we keep bookmarked even after we got in at Harrisburg.
Then this morning we see this:
That was one of their updated posts, as it wasn’t there yesterday morning when we checked their site. Knowing that they always get the time of the local earthquakes wrong (likely because of how they read the Universal Time Code; they need to set it to U.S. Central Daylight Time, not Greenwich time), we went to look, and sure enough:
Says it, right there: 5:46 P.M. How hard IS this, really??
Here’s a map, for those of you out-of-area reading about it:
It’s the blue dot. Lil shaker. Woot.
That makes four little quakes in our downstate area (closer to the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone than the New Madrid) in the past few months. Don’t know whether that’s a good sign or bad.
But what we’re really interested in are the lights.
On the night before the April 18, 2008 earthquake that really rocked us in downstate, when we were living in Browns, there was a flash like that. The youngest teen was on the floor in the living room watching TV when it happened, and came to get us because she thought the TV was frying or something. We didn’t think anything of it until the next day.
What are “earthquake lights”? This site explains a little bit…but not everything. As you may be aware, Ang has discussed the flashes accompanying the boom events here in downstate and elsewhere. Many people believe they’re a discharge of static electricity. But there’s no real science to them…and the fact that we saw them Wednesday night doesn’t really explain anything (except that it helps check the mitigation in the house).
So…did anyone else out there see any kind of flashing or lights preceding Thursday evening’s earthquake? Let us know if you did.