Shakers and Quakers

Earthquakes. We are in the middle of a swarm.

Today a couple of nice strong jolts at school threw the kindergartners into a tizzy. The quakes are pretty small, but we are just a couple of miles from Mogul so we are really feeling the tremors. At home, we sorta hold our breath for a couple seconds while we wait for the rolling to stop. But at school, the kidlets have to crawl under the tables every time we have a quake and that's adding to their anxiety.

The first strong 3.2 quake surprised us all. I said, "Earthquake! Get under the tables." Twenty-eight freaked-out little bodies in fetal position were under the tables before I finished. I've never been listened to so well!

That one day produced twenty-five quakes alone. Now our classroom is free of anything heavy that could fall down on a child. We plan an earthquake evacuation drill soon. Just in case. Because we don't really know what will develop.

Now the quakes are constant, usually mini ones so small that there's just a little twitch. We've had several 3 pointers that are just loud enough and bounce us around enough that we stop and wonder just how big the quake might get. Then we had the 4.2 and heaved a sigh of relief since we figured that's what the swarm had been working up to. But now we're wondering if we are experiencing aftershocks or foreshocks.

The UNR Seismology Lab is bookmarked and referred to constantly for the latest as are the USGS earthquake sites. The whole West Coast is shaking right now, but Reno apparently has the "E" ticket.

We're unimpressed (usually) by anything less than a 6.0, although we enjoy the lesser ones. Hey, the 7.1 Whittier Quake set the bar for us, although the waving walls from one of the 5.o+ Livermore quakes was kinda fun. And there was a 4.2 in La Habra that lifted our apartment straight up and set it down with a bang.

This swarm of quakes is a first for us though. Today produced four 3.2+ quakes, two of which woke us up last night and two during the day. There were about fifty other smaller ones (I counted them on the UNR site), many of which we felt.

I look out at Mt. Rose and Slide Mountain, all 10,000 feet of them and remember that they didn't get way higher than the Truckee Meadows without some serious shaking going on.

It's a good thing that geology ranks high in entertainment value at our house!