The Sliding Blues

The Sliding Blues
Originally uploaded by mightyquinninwky©™

I am sure most of you have heard that this area was bit by two mild/moderate earthquakes today..about five hours apart. My morning began at 4:30 am; I went to bed at 2 am unfortunately!! It is getting near the end of the semester and the work is really pilling up. I had just finished a lesson plan and shutdown my computers (checked my flickr site one more time) and laid down. Around 4:25, Nick my runt "MaineCoon" cat jumped on my chest, I figured he was confused and thought it was time to eat. This happens with him from time to time, but this was soon to show itself to be different. A rumble started very low and kept increasing in volume and power, at first I thought it was the neighbor's kid playing is car stereo with four fifteen inch subs, but this wasn't the case. The rumbling kept increasing and no noise from the road was evident, the next thing I thought was a plane flying too low. I began to imagine a jet engine falling into my house...kinda like Donny Darko, but then it hit me. The New Madrid fault, I am feeling an earthquake. I pulled up the widgets on my Mac G5, one is an earthquake around the world alert widget, and clicked on it to look at the USGS (United State Geological Survey) site. After about six refreshes the site showed ILLINOIS (Olney, IL) 5.4. I went from excited to apprehensive to scared. I am never scared in severe weather and usually keep a cool head in most situations, but this was completely different. I have even been in a few quakes of 4 or less, but this 5.2 was a whole new ballgame. Completely out of control is the only way to describe it. Nowhere to run (out of your house, but after that?), nothing to stop it, and its much bigger than you!! I can't imagine what it was like here during the 1812 quake. It was close to a 10 on the Richter Scale (you can find a nice definition of the Richter Scale here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/glossary.php?term=Richter%20scale ) and a IX to a XI on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale (Definition and a map of the area and fault I am on is here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/glossary.php?term=intensity ). People wrote about the ground breaking like waves on the ocean, and the Ohio river jump back a mile in some places (North of my house you drive across the Ohio and it is still KY for about two miles..Ellis Park a horse track is on the other side of the Ohio river) and ran backwards for a few hours...now that is power!! Luckily the area around here was sparsely populated and the buildings were made of wood and not over a couple of stories tall. So there were no deaths recorded from that quake. If we had one on that scale today, Evansville, IN, Memphis, TN, St. Louis, MO., Indy, IN, Cincy, OH, Lexington, KY, Louisville, KY, Nashville, TN, Knoxville, TN would have extensive damage if not disappear completely and cities like Chicago and Atlanta would have major damage. Even DC would have a lot of damage. This should remind us there is a sleeping giant or monster right under our feet. This isn't a subduction zone like the Ring of Fire in the Pacific or the spreading of the floor in the Atlantic, but remnant of an ocean that was squeezed out of being to make our continent what it is today. A friendly reminder of our past and a bomb ticking in our future!!

Severe Storms

Fire in the Sky II
Originally uploaded by mightyquinninwky©™

I promised myself after the drought we have had over the past two years that I wouldn't complain about rain. But the old adage 'When it rains, it pours' is happening here. It has been raining almost none stop for the past month and a half. There have been a few days with more than two inches of rain and then one day of over ten inches of rain. We have gone way past catching up our rain totals and now the ground is saturated, streams are swollen, the Ohio is rising, and the levees are bursting at the seams. The weather around here used to mild except for a few severe storms once in a while, but now it seems it is never just dry, but a drought, a gentle rain storm, but a gully washer that floods the area, a light dusting of snow, but several inches of ice bring the area to a stand still and destroying building, cars and trees. Mother nature is sending us a message, but I am afraid that we are not paying attention, or we are choosing not to hear what is being said!! We need to wake up, if it isn't already too late....