Footprints on the Moon

Talk about a wake up call this morning! How does the song go (which I now have stuck in my head, by the way)? “I felt the earth move under my feet…” 5:39 a.m. an earthquake that’s been given a preliminary score of 5.4 on the Richter scale hit about 6 miles out from West Salem, Illinois. I really don’t know any more than that because that’s all the information they’d had on the news this morning before I had to leave for work.

My alarm went off at 5:30, I shut it off, laid there for a minute and turned on the light but didn’t get up. I don’t like to hit the ground running in the morning, so I lay there for a few minutes adjusting to the light and just being awake. But then the bed started shaking. At first, I thought it was Lucy scratching the foot board like she likes to do, but then it got more insistent. So I sat up a little bit, and noticed the cord of my radio on the dresser was moving back and forth as well. The word earthquake flashed through my head, but I dismissed it because NAH! We don’t get earthquakes in this part of the country! Needless to say, I got up pretty quickly after that. And I definitely felt less insane when I turned the morning news on and they were talking about an earthquake. We’re in Northern Indiana, close to the Michigan state line, approximately 5 hours from the epicenter of the earthquake, and we felt it up here. The newscasters were reporting that people were claiming to have felt it further north into Michigan, and her parents in Ohio had also felt the shake.

It’s been interesting talking to people this morning when I got into work about whether or not they felt it. A lot of people didn’t know anything happened… there were some other people who thought they might want to seek some kind of addiction treatment because they felt their chairs shake, but the person sitting right next to them in the same room didn’t notice anything. I know the guards who were on shift didn’t know anything had happened until someone told them. Crazy!! We know what to do during fires and tornadoes, but I’ll have to ask my boss if we have post orders for earthquakes!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 7:17 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.