earthquake
We had just checked into our B&B in Christchurch, New Zealand, and were unpacking in our room when the room started shaking and continued for what felt like a long time but was really only a moment. Everything in our room rattled and it sounded like a freight train was rumbling by. We were confused, as we didn’t think there were railroad tracks nearby.
When things calmed down, I went down to the reception area to find our host.
“Oh, that? It’s just a wee quake. Only a 2 or 3,” she said calmly.
That was in 1998 and was the first time my husband and I had experienced an earthquake of any magnitude. New Zealand is in an active seismic area and averages 14,000-15,000 every year, with 150-200 strong enough to be felt.
However we both grew up in places not known for seismic activity, and we live in Virginia, which definitely does not have a long, continuous history of earthquakes.
Oddly enough, we experienced our first earthquake in Virginia just two years later, then again a year after that. And then there was a big one in 2011 that measured 5.8 and the epicenter was 30 miles from our house, plus strong aftershocks for a couple of days.
Back in 1998, we thought our first experience with a small earthquake was memorable but luckily we were not actually in danger. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to experience the large earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 that caused so much destruction in Christchurch.
And now I’m going to put a wish out into the universe that our luck continues to hold and we never experience any sort of major earthquake, tsunami, or other natural disasters.