5.7 earthquake this morning, epicenter about 3 miles from my house. Felt like someone picked up my house and started shaking it! About 55,000 without power which sucks, since people are trying to quarantine and WFH. The airport has been completely shut down due to the traffic control tower having to be evacuated. They’re evacuating from other parts of the airport as well, roads leading to the airport are closed. Looks like there’s some damage in downtown SLC as well. Some pretty powerful aftershocks are still rolling through.
Small quake to anyone in CA I’m sure, but it’s rattled (no pun intended :P) the fuck out of people here who are already on edge over the coronavirus quarantine. Definitely not the way I wanted to start my day, and these aftershocks that send my house swaying side to side every 30 minutes or so fucking suck.
Be safe and avoid getting near anything that might not have handled the quake well. I don’t know what building codes are like for you there, Kevin. Hopefully pretty good.
I have power, thankfully. Utah has been prepping for what is known locally as The Big One since I’ve been alive so modern buildings have decent codes and some of the older ones (schools in particular) have been retrofitted. However, there’s still some old buildings that are vulnerable but they’re mostly in the downtown area of SLC. I’m guessing that’s where most of the damage reports I’m hearing about are originating from.
My phone is screaming at me with a “Shelter in place” alert as apparently seismologists are expecting some more serious aftershocks? Dunno how any of this really works, this is my first rodeo of this sort. :D
Haha! Yeah I figure for areas prone to quakes this is no big deal and probably similar to how I hear horror stories of an inch or two of snow somewhere.
Woooo, and just as I’m typing this there’s my house swaying around again. This fucking sucks.
I first thought “5.7 how cute” but being 3 miles from the epicenter is no joke. Especially if you aren’t used to the ground shaking. Especially when added onto a quarantine
The 3 miles from your house is the key part of this. I’ve lived my whole life in California and have been through many earthquakes including the 1971 San Fernando (6.5) and the 1994 Northridge (6.7) but the scariest one I went through was only a 4.x that happened to be just a few miles from our college campus. The building was shaking around way more than anything I’d ever seen in any earthquake before or after.
If I recall correctly the dropoff depends on the specific soil the energy is being transmitted through, but it drops off fairly quickly with distance, and even a small earthquake is going to feel pretty huge if you’re almost directly on top of it.
You probably experienced a lot more shaking than many Southern California residents have.
That’s interesting and good to know. I mean, stuff was bouncing on the countertops and the whole house was just bouncing like crazy (and taking me along for the ride). When I saw it come in at a 5.7 I was like “Dear God I can’t even fathom what a 6+ is like”.
I gotta love my big derpy black lab, Labowski. Throughout the quake he just stood waiting by his food bowl with his tail swishing and a dopey grin on his face. “Weird, whole house is moving. Anyway, is it breakfast time?”. Labs, gotta love 'em.
That was my experience being a few miles from our 4.x earthquake. It was crazy. I could see the walls shaking around (or at least that was my perception, maybe it was me being shaking around a bit). I thought it was a huge earthquake and it turned out to be tiny.
I also talked to a bunch of students in Mexico who were in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake (8.0). They thought it was a lot of fun and everyone was laughing and didn’t discover until later that it was huge and that large parts of Mexico City had been flattened. The perception can be very different depending on how close you are to the epicenter.
In 1976 or 77 I has just gone to bed in a 2nd floor apartment in Berkeley, just a mile or two from the Hayward fault, when I heard a rumbling sound that grew louder. No doubt it was an earthquake - probably just a second or two before the shaking started, but a very memorable second or two. The shaking was as intense as I had ever experience.
I think it was maybe 4.5, with no damage anywhere. It was just really close, and close to the surface, which matters a lot in terms of local shaking.
