Posted by Perry
This morning the burg awoke to a bit of shaking. A 5.2 magnitude earthquake struck in Illinois just prior to dawn. The tremor was felt from Evansville and St. Louis all the way to Indianapolis and Cincinnati.
Now if this tells you anything about me – I slept through it. I didn’t notice the slightest twitch or shudder in the ground at all and after reading the reports on it I wondered why. The answer was simple – depending on what type of foundation your home is on you either felt it, or you hardly noticed it at all.
The experts said that if you are on a foundation of bedrock, you wouldn’t have felt the quake very long as the solid foundation would dissipate the shock waves rather quickly. The opposite would be true for a porous foundation such as clay, you would have felt stronger vibrations for a longer period of time. This was proven by the reports received from people across the region – some stated the shaking lasted but a few seconds while others stated it lasted roughly half a minute.
We here in the midwest are not used to things such as earthquakes – we’re more used to strong spring storms, the occasional tornado, and cold winters. Earthquakes are NOT our forte – never will be. So you can only imagine that this is a big story here – all the time the people who deal with these things (mostly in California) are probably bemused by our ‘wee little’ shake. It’s kind of frightening when you think about it – Mother Nature can really get your attention when she throws a tantrum.
Hopefully there will be no more shaking in the burg – but you never know what nature will throw at you next.