The Rapture

Blizzards, Heat waves, Tordados, And now, the biggest earthquake in 10,000 years!
(Hurricane pending!)

Since so many of you have been wondering and calling, I figured it was time for a special bloggy report about the trembler that hit D.C. this week.

I was sitting at my desk, typing at a proposal, when the building started to rumble. The rumble was big at first, then softened, so my initial reaction was: "Oh my goodness, a truck just ran into the building!" I even tilted my head out the window to look into the alley to see if I could figure out where it had hit. But, the rumbling never completely stopped. Suddenly, the whole building started to rumble louder, and my next thought was: "Whoa! The A/C system is short circuiting ! I can hear all the pipes and lights shaking!" And THEN I realized that everything on my desk was bouncing around, and it finally dawned on me what was going on. At this point, everyone popped out of their offices and starting running around a little bit ridiculously saying "What do we do!? What do we do?!" "Get in the door frame, guys!" I yelled and took my post under my own door frame of my office. I remembered this protocol from my childhood earthquake drills in Washington State, where we actually had to bring earthquake survival kits to school.

Then, just as soon as it started, it was over. I won't lie, it was a significant earthquake- bigger feeling than what I remember in Washington, or my summer in LA. I immediately got online and logged on to the US Geological survey. Yep, it showed a magnitude 5 earthquake had just hit somewhere in Virginia. I pulled up seismographs (To my fellow nerds: they give Dopplar radar a run for its money) and began googling the news. We turned on CNN, and realized that most of DC had streamed out of its buildings and had been evacuated.

If you saw the news, you saw that the Pentagon, White House, Capital, and most of DC's offices were evacuated and sent home early. Not us. My initial reaction: Come on people, it was an earthquake. Not one single person in the entire eastern U.S. who felt this thing got so much as a scratch of an injury. On the other hand, we don't DO earthquakes here. So much of DC's architecture is Victorian, or older, and lots of the buildings just aren't safe. Even some of the new stuff is not really built to earthquake code: A brand new shopping center downtown burst a pipe and destroyed a lot of the goods in Best Buy and Marshall's below it. Later in the evening I drove by the national Cathedral, pictured above, and saw the crumbled spires. Bricks fell off of tons of old buildings and chimneys. Heck, even the Washington Monument got a crack! 5.8 is real for us, so I guess better safe than sorry.

DCPS and PG county public schools were cancelled for a few days to assess the broken buildings and potential pipe leaks. Apparently more than 60 schools were damaged in PG county, my old stomping grounds. The other major catastrophe was the evening commute. The metro simply was not running. There were thousands of people packed onto the trains, which ran at 15 mph. Police were brought in to manage the crowds. I read all of this online and decided to try and take a bus home. But then, to my great dismay, I read that the traffic lights were out downtown and the entire city was gridlocked. My coworker told me it took him 2 hours to drive 3 miles!! I realized it would be better to stay in Bethesda and wait it out, so I called around for some company and went poking around the shops uptown. Eventually, I made it home after 11pm.

This post already feels outdated with the approach of Hurricane Irene this weekend. It's hard to say how bad DC is going to have it when it comes to this storm. Some reports have it tracking west, putting DC in the middle of the path of destruction. Other reports have us missing it all together. But a strong possibility for tons of rain and wind and power outages are definitely on the horizon. As a matter of fact, I just got a very disconcerting robocall from our electric company. The message essentially was, "Hello, you're definitely going to lose power, and we've got a lot of trucks we're borrowing from other states, but uh, it may be a few days, so uh, get ready."

Great.

I'll be sure to report how things go this weekend- until then, it's off to the grocery store to try and pick up the last of the batteries, some bottled water and maybe a brew or two to get us through the storm !

Peace and Love.