my family and natural disasters

My sister, mom, and brother experienced the earthquake in Virginia. The emails (how a family of engineers deal with a crisis):

My sister Cat:

Pretty interesting, got hit by a book off a bookshelf but otherwise nothing happened from the stupid quake. Hope everyone fared well! Kind of interested to get home and see if anything fell/broke. All is well!


My dad:

Earthquake about 4 miles deep, not too far north of I-64 between Charlottesville and Richmond (south of Lake Anna)...Mary (my mom) said she felt it shake the house pretty good, but everything seems OK. And this weekend we'll get hit with a hurricane there! (maybe he's too excited about the hurricane - but my dad loves weather)

my sister:

Hurricane should be a non-event here.  At least the hurricane would put out the fire in the great dismal swamp!!! (dismal swamp has been a big conversation in the family)


My brother Bob:

Unfortunately it stopped before I could get my phone out - I was going to try to use the accelerometers in it to measure the vibration (who's the biggest geek of all???).  I even have just the perfect app that I wrote for measuring my car's acceleration.

Just got home, nothing seems out of place or disturbed, although Rocco (his cat) was uncharacteristically affectionate when I walked through the door.

It's comical to read about the overblown knee-jerk reaction of everyone (especially Congress).  It simply wasn't that powerful.

A scare-mongering quote from washingtonpost.com:

Minutes after the quake, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Marcia McNutt — who watched objects falling from the shelves in her office — cautioned that the shaking might not be over.

“What the concern is, of course, is that this is a foreshock,” she said. “If it’s a foreshock, then the worst is yet to come.”

OK, EVERYBODY PANIC  :)

I'm not making this up, it's an actual headline.

OH GOD: The First Photo Of The DC Earthquake Devastation:
http://www.bestweekever.tv/2011-08-23/oh-god-the-first-photo-of-the-dc-earthquake-devastation/

my brother Steve:

Events like this and our upcoming Uranium Mining report should make it fairly interesting in the state.  The real damage was to Verizon and ATT, I thought after 9/11 they had their system setup for events where everyone calls everyone from their phones.  I never lost my data connection, but the voice and text were shot.  One of our project directors sent me a text I will never get that reads, "Steve, what did you drop?  The whole building is shaking."
 
my brother Bob:

Have you been fracking in Mineral, VA?


Thanks for writing my blog today sibs. You're funnier than I am :D