Earfquake!

There was just a 4.8 on the SF Penninsula, which I interpret as the San Andreas fault just reminding everyone that it’s been 105 years today since it was last very angry.

I think it was 3.8, which is confirmed by the USGS data.

Bah, I hadn’t actually looked it up yet, only heard it secondhand. A 3.8 is like a truck driving past your house.

Yeah we felt it in the city; was extremely brief and yeah, felt like a rumble real quick and that was it. Aside from the fact that there weren’t any trucks driving by (that lasted really short), you could easily mistake it for that. Second one of ones just like this since I’ve been here.

It’s an interesting way of breaking up what’s going on in the day. Usually it’s like… you feel something, than was like… uh… what was that? Then people in your social networks start wondering if there was an earthquake. Then you think, yeah that was an earthquake! Then you start talking about it. Eventually someone quicklinks the USGS map and voila, a 3.8 right near Pacifica.

— Alan

The whole “dogs = earthquake detectors” thing is a load of bull, though. Our office is full of dogs and they slept through the whole thing.

— Alan

Even earthquakes know that you should let sleeping dogs lie.

Why is your office full of dogs?

Because it’s a dog sanctuary?

:)

Nah really, it’s because we have a dog policy. So in our particular team/suite, we have maybe… 80 people and 6-9 dogs in this space normally on any given day.

— Alan

Yesterday’s 3.8 was weird — in my building at work we experienced it as a single loud FOOOOM with dying vibrations rather than a sustained shake. Everyone thought a truck or plane had rammed the building.

Look out for another quake…planetary alignment will create gravity anomoly.

…which has been proven to not really cause anything. And saying “another quake” is pretty ambiguous, considering there are dozens if not hundreds of notable quakes around the world every day.

— Alan

Minnesota just had a 2.5 magnitude earthquake. 2.5! And why can’t I capitalize numbers for emphasis? Lame.

Hmm…is grave the adjectival form of gravity? All the capital numbers have been sucked into space…see? it’s started.

10 people dead so far as a couple of quakes hit Spain. Around Madrid it looks like.

Mousefarts. ;-)

SW of Murcia. The USGS has it listed as a single 5.1, but The Guardian and other sources report it as two quakes, a 5.2 and a 4.4.

That sucks…hope the death toll stays low. 5.1 isn’t really all that big either, but apparently buildings are collapsing all over southern Spain. Crazy.

Remember Fukushima reactor 1? It’s worse than they thought, the fuel rods are exposed.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said fuel rods are fully exposed in the No. 1 reactor at its stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, setting back the utility’s plan to resolve the crisis.

The water level is 1 meter (3.3 feet) below the base of the fuel assembly, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility known as Tepco, told reporters at a briefing in Tokyo. Melted fuel has dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel and is still being cooled, Matsumoto said. The company doesn’t know how long the rods have been exposed, he said.

Tepco is trying to contain the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl after a quake and tsunami two months ago knocked out power and cooling systems at the Fukushima station. The utility planned to flood the No. 1 containment chamber, which surrounds the reactor vessel, in a procedure known as water entombment to prevent fuel from overheating.

“I’ve been saying from the beginning the water tomb plan won’t work,” said Tadashi Narabayashi, a professor of nuclear engineering at Hokkaido University. “Tepco must work on a water circulation cooling system as soon as possible. They’ve been going round and round in circles and now realize this is what they need to do.”

It’s unlikely the situation has worsened with the discovery the rods are exposed because they’ve probably been out of the water since shortly after the crisis started, Narabayashi said.

Here in Spain we don’t suffer lots of big earthquakes so buildings are not prepared like i suppose they are in Japan or in LA. Still, the collapsed buildings were only two from a small town and a very old belltower.

Yeah, building codes are a large part of what prevents damage in major earthquake zones, so when a quake that would otherwise be relatively minor strikes outside of a major earthquake zone, it can be a big deal. That’s why Haiti suffered so much damage, too, even though their quake was smaller than some of the aftershocks in Japan.

That means they got really lucky, at least from what I understand. The rods must have cooled enough before exposure to avoid a much bigger issue. Not that this is safe, but exposing hot rods could have been much, much worse then what they have right now.