EARTHQUAKE in Illinois

[t walgamuth]

This morning I was woken up by something shaking the house (or bed, I was not sure). There seemed to be a large shake followed by a very rythmatic shaking that gradually tapered off. I said "Whooooaaahah! what was that?" and got up and stuck my head outside to see if I could hear anything.

Then I got back in bed and noticed it was 5:39 am....our alarm goes off at 5:40 am. So after it goes off my Mrs. and I were talking and I told her about the mysterious shaking and she accused me of waking my self up by some biological function (which will go unnamed in this polite company.)

A few minutes later I am in the kitchen drinking some water and the phone rings ....I am thinking "Who the heck is calling at this hour?".....and its my son who lives next door behind us. He says "did you feel the earthquake?".....and I say "yes but I was not sure what it was". It woke him too and he was sure enough about it that he got online and found a website that shows satellite imagine of earthquakes real time and there was one near Vincinnes in Illinois that was apparently a 6.0.

Thats on the New Madrid fault, I believe.

I imagine there was some damage down in that area.

When I built our house there was a very active double train track within 150' of our house. To cut down on vibration I put three layers of rubber foam between a triple plate between the concrete foundation and my wood framing on my house. By the time we built my son's house the train tracks had been removed so we didn't bother. So he could feel the quake a lot more intensly than I did, I imagine.

We feel them here from time to time. This is the third that I can remember feeling in my 59 years.

I imagine in California it would pretty much go unmentioned, but here it is a big excitement!

Tom W