WombatNation

Ok, this is getting tedious. It looks like I need to investigate writing some code to automate writing the inital part of these earthquake posts.

At 9:21 this morning we had a 3.5 magnitude earthquake at almost the exact same location as yesterday evening’s quake. I was still lying in bed when this one hit. I felt a quick, thudding jerk to the right, followed by a series of smaller bumps that diminished in amplitude. It lasted for only about 1 second. The direction of the initial movement was away from the epicenter.

Just two days after our 3.7 temblor, another earthquake just struck tonight at 10:50 pm. This one felt a little weaker at our house, but it had more of a rumbling, rolling character. It seemed to last just over one second, with one loud thump followed quickly by several thumps of diminishing amplitude.

It was also a 3.7 according to the USGS. When I first went to the page for tonight’s it was listed as a 3.6, but when I refreshed the page it had changed to a 3.7 after review by a seismologist. This quake was also 2 miles ESE of Berkeley, but it was 6.2 miles deep instead of 5.6 miles deep.
Let’s hope the North Hayward fault is just letting off a little stress, and not warming up for the big one.

Not a huge quake, but it was pretty close to us. The preliminary USGS report says it was a 3.7 at 7:12 pm 2 miles ESE of Berkeley. The epicenter was very close to the Claremont hotel in Oakland.

I felt a couple of thumps over about 2 seconds. There was one relatively strong thump and a couple of mild ones. The only damage we know of so far at our house was one cookie sliding off a cookie sheet in the oven.
I filled out the USGS survey indicating how strong the shaking was at my house. The Community Internet Intensity Map for this quake is available online.

A friend who was still at the office in Alameda IM’d me immediately to ask if I also felt the quake. My wife called KALX and they didn’t feel anything there, even though they are much closer to the epicenter. Of course, the radio station is in the basement of a building on which a ton of money was spent on seismic retrofitting.

Given how minor the quake was, I don’t think the seismic work we had done on our house this summer made much of a difference, but I’m still very happy to have had the work done.

Not a mad German, actually, but mad skills (I refuse to write skillz, damn it, I just did) demonstrated by a German woman from Universität Würzburg. She performs some amazing stunts while riding a fixie in a gymnasium. I’ve seen guys do some of this stuff on stunt bikes, but I think it’s a lot easier on a small bike that is built for stunts. Not that I would really know. My best stunt was doing a stoppie on my road bike while skidding through an intersection past the hood of a car that almost cut me off. Maybe that and fishtailing around a dog that ran directly in front of me in the street as I was coming down a 11 percent slope at about 35 miles per hour. Don’t tell my mother about either of those.
I think she is performing at some kind of end of semester event at the university. I tried to understand the conversation in German at the beginning, but they weren’t talking loud enough for me to understand much of it.