Anyway, my last few weeks have been quite eventful, thanks to a few natural disasters. Last Tuesday we had an earthquake; and this weekend we had a hurricane!
Now, I had been in a few earthquakes before. By “been in” I mean I’ve been there when rumblings happened. By “earthquakes” I mean generally minor shakes. Once in Michigan when I was little, once in Costa Rica, and most recently in New Jersey.
The earthquake in Costa Rica is an interested story. While I was working with leatherback turtles there, we patrolled the beaches all night. So after returning to our science station at 5am, we generally passed out exhausted until brunch at 11am.
Our station was about 50 meters from the Pacific Ocean. One morning I awakened to my bunk bed shaking (we shared a room with 10 roommates!). Thinking someone was deliberately messing with me, I turned over with a scowl on my face, only to find that nobody else was in the room! The shaking continued for a few more seconds and I realized it was an earthquake. A fleeting thought crossed my mind – “I hope there’s no tsunami” – and I rolled back over and fell asleep. Later that day, someone merely mentioned that we had an earthquake and nothing else was heard about it.
Tuesday in New Jersey was interesting as well. I was at our family friends' beach house and the house started swaying back and forth. For a second we thought it might be someone rumbling around upstairs for something, but it was a bit too violent for that. Looking out the window I saw the neighbors at their doors terrified by the shaking as well. “It was an earthquake,” I shouted. A quick glance at MSNBC confirmed it – 5.8 in/around Charlottesville, VA.
Of course the hurricane would come the weekend I move into my new apartment. My mom had been worrying about this thing for over a week, so we decided to move up the move in day from Saturday to Friday, and I’m glad we did because boy did it rain on Saturday!!!
Apart from the rain, I don't think Hurricane Irene lived up to the hurricane of the century moniker, at least not in Philadelphia. Nothing was down in my neighborhood and I only heard of some flooding in a few suburbs around here. Not sure how the NJ barrier islands fared though, since I currently only get one TV channel (Spanish TV Univision) and no internet.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the earthquake. But I do have pictures of the hurricane!! And the aftermath - blue skies!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment