Earthquake!

Wow, that was fun! I was sitting at my desk in my office on the 3rd floor (of a 3-story building) yesterday afternoon and it felt like the building was doing a wiggly dance for a few seconds. I thought, "That can't be an earthquake, I wonder what it is." My building is across from the helipad at Upstate, and I thought it might be that, though a helicopter has never shaken the building before and there was no helicopter in sight. It sort of felt like the motion originated in the southeast corner of the building, but that could just be my brain trying to make sense of what was happening. Of course I went online to try to find something that confirmed it was an earthquake, but I think it was too soon for anything to be there. I went out in the hallway and talked to other people in my building and then believed that it WAS an earthquake. It wasn't scary, but it wasn't very strong either - nothing fell off shelves or anything like that.

Here are some details about what happened:

A 5.0-magnitude earthquake in central Canada has left several cities shaken up, as the area rarely deals with tremors.

Although original reports measured the quake at 5.5 on the Richter Scale, an updated assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey knocked it down to 5.0. While a 5.0-quake isn’t usually considered particularly powerful—as far as earthquakes go—the quake’s origin was thought to be quite deep, which impacts how far the effects are felt. The epicenter was in the Ontario-Quebec border region, north of Ottawa, approximately 11 miles below ground.

Apparently the tremors were strongly felt in Ottawa, where several buildings were evacuated and rescue workers were flooded with calls. “The city was in a bit of a panic, which is to be expected,” Ottawa paramedic spokesman, J. P. Trottier, told the Globe and Mail.

The last time a major earthquake hit the same fault line is in 1998, measuring 5.4 on the Richter Scale.