Earthquake in Illinois

[gerbs4me]

I didn't think I'd ever hear of this happening in Illinois. I think it was around a 4.1 on the Richter scale. It happened around 1 a.m. I didn't feel anything because I was sleeping. this is a strange event.

 

[BlueNinja]

Hmmm. I don't recall any earthquakes here in KS, but theyre possible anywhere. When I saw Richter i thought FlisKits

 

[HeadHunter]

Originally posted by gerbs4me
I didn't think I'd ever hear of this happening in Illinois. I think it was around a 4.1 on the Richter scale. It happened around 1 a.m. I didn't feel anything because I was sleeping. this is a strange event.

Is a strange location...things don't really get to rockn' and rolln' until you get to the mid or upper 5's. The biggest I've been in was a 6.8 about 25 miles from the epicenter.

10.0 on the pucker scale though!

 

[DynaSoar]

Originally posted by gerbs4me
I didn't think I'd ever hear of this happening in Illinois. I think it was around a 4.1 on the Richter scale. It happened around 1 a.m. I didn't feel anything because I was sleeping. this is a strange event.

I felt one in Gary, IN around 1965, only because I was standing on a cinder block wall at the time. Epicenter was near St. Louis. My uncle is a soil mechanics scientist. He became president of Richter Associates when Richter (of the Scale) retired. He told me about the New Madrid Fault.

The New Madrid Fault runs through the mid-west, centered near New Madrid, MO. Last time it had a big quake was 1811. Estimates are it was around Richter 8.0. It caused 6 foot waves. In the ground. The only larger earthquake known to hit the US was the 1964 Anchorage quake. He says there's a 90% chance New Madrid will cut loose sometime between now and 2050. It'll be like 100 megatons dropped on Memphis.

 

[HeadHunter]

Originally posted by DynaSoar
...It caused 6 foot waves. In the ground...

That was the wierdest part of the whole experince, didn't have time to measure them though, it was like a big rock had been thrown in a pond. I was on high ground above a meadow next to pine trees and you could see them going away from us and into the trees.

 

[cls]

I was on the 2nd floor of an office building looking out the window during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake - I definitely saw waves and waves rolling across the parking lots.

solid ground - huh!! never think that again.

 

[illini]

Illinois earthquakes are not that uncommon due to the New Madrid fault. I remember experiencing one sometime in the '89-'91 timeframe while in my apartment in Urbana. Felt like a large truck rumbling by, shook the building a bit, didn't think anything of it. That night on Channel 3 news I learned it was an earthquake. They had a film crew on the spot to show the damage: a few cinder blocks had been displaced on a building a few towns over. In Shampoo-Banana (Champaign-Urbana to the uninitiated) that was big news!

 

[kenobi65]

Originally posted by illini868891
Illinois earthquakes are not that uncommon due to the New Madrid fault.

Although, apparently, this one wasn't connected to that fault.

I'd just fallen asleep, and slept right through it. It did knock over a few of my Star Wars action figures, but that was about it.

 

[qMaxx]

We had a 5.-something about a week after Return of the Jedi opened in Columbus, Ohio. Me and my date were watching the movie and all the seats in the theater started shaking. Thought it was weird, but really didn't pay a whole lot of attention.

Found out later that it was a quake.

 

[Elapid]

i think it is recorded as a 6.8 magnitude quake under Sylmar i'll never forget when the clocks all stopped though; 6:01am Feb. 9, 1971.

it lasted a full minute!
that was the strangest thing...

 

[brianc]

Fort Wayne, Indiana

I once lived in a mobile home that shook whenever my washing machine
went into the spin cycle...

One day, I was dozing on the couch and though to myself- "Hey, I'm not
doing laundry"! Sure enough, a few minutes later the local TV put a crawl
across the bottom of the football game- 3.2 New Madrid.

 

[daveyfire]

I was out flying rockets a couple earthquakes ago. Lucerne is a fairly big, open, flat chunk of land. I had just hit the button to launch a red Praying Mantis on a J135W (funny how you remember these things!) when all of a sudden, I started moving. It was really nifty -- you could see the waves going through the ground for miles around!

 

[illini]

Originally posted by daveyfire
It was really nifty -- you could see the waves going through the ground for miles around!

That would be cool to see in a perverse sort of way. A friend of mine was in grad school working at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) when the San Francisco earthquake of '89 hit. He said it was like ground surfing.

 

[stevem]

if memory serves me the New Madrid fault had one of this country's owrst earthquakes back in the mid-late 1800's. I believe there was an entire town lost when the earthquake re-routed the Mississippi. Everyone thinks CA is gonna get the big one on CA...maybe not...

 

[kenobi65]

Originally posted by stevem
if memory serves me the New Madrid fault had one of this country's owrst earthquakes back in the mid-late 1800's. I believe there was an entire town lost when the earthquake re-routed the Mississippi. Everyone thinks CA is gonna get the big one on CA...maybe not...

You're correct. New Madrid's been generally quiet for a long time, but that doesn't mean it'll stay that way forever.

I wouldn't stand too close to that Arch in St. Louis, if I were you.

 

[rstaff3]

We can even get them here on the right coast, there was one in Virginia a year or so ago. No damage IIRC. People in MD claim to have felt it but I don't believe them.

I was just in Berkeley and my son had a neat web site run by the USGS that shows where the quakes are in (almost?) real time. Pretty cool. I was surprised on how many tiny ones there are all the time.