Earthquake in Cheverly, Maryland

August 23–About ten minutes or a quarter to 2:00 p.m., my whole house shook. So did my neighbors’. This was a real earthquake. My house is brick; everything shook from basement to roof; heavy things fell off the mantel and a bookcase. I am sitting in the room I use for a home office–like most of the rest of the house–and behind me some books and papers are strewn on the floor that were more or less where they belonged, a short time ago. A first for me individually, and don’t let anyone tell you this is a small event. A four-story house (counting basement) does not shake lightly.

Little damage in my home–I’m about to go out to case the neighborhood.

If only the climate-change deniers would stop denying. These bouts of extreme drought, followed by serious monsoon-type flooding, are not much better for the earth’s crust than they are for farmers, or for ordinary people who would like to have their yards, flowers and trees flourish.

In simplest terms, our planet’s atmosphere is eroding. We need to think about how to slow down that process, and then how to reverse it. We need our atmosphere to protect us from being whipsawed by what are nowadays termed ‘weather events’.

No word yet on how the rest of the Washington, D.C., suburbs have fared.

more later

Update 2:13 p.m.:

This was bigger than I thought–my next-door neighbor felt the quake in her vehicle, in New Carrollton. She thought something was wrong with her car–got out to check to see whether a tire was flat, when her daughter told her, “Mom, the whole car is shaking.”

Walking around outside to view the neighborhood, no visible signs of damage, though my next-door neighbor had some breakage when objects fell. No trees seem to be down, fortunately, and no cracks in nearby streets or sidewalks so far. Plenty of sirens, though.

Update 5:50 p.m.:

For the sake of contributing a little to science, I tried to input my local (home) data for the U.S. Geologic [Survey] here. No luck: after filling out the form, when I tried to submit it, the server basically froze up. Either this was another communications snafu like our cell phones–can’t use those in a real emergency, America–or the usgs website was overloaded by too many people trying the same thing at once.

Would seem to be typical of an emergency . . .

I guess the all-destructo GOPers will be happy at that one. After doing everything they can do to harm the legitimate operations of government, to prevent responsible governance, and to defame anyone who sees the whole thing differently, they can point to ‘gummint failing.’