Wednesday 27 February 2008

Quakey-Wakey!


The biggest earthquake to hit the UK for 25 years struck last night at 0:56 and I was awake to witness it here in Withington, Manchester!

I felt the entire building shaking and saw items moving for several seconds. I kinda had a hunch on what it was after witnessing the Manchester Earthquake swarm of 2002. A couple of my neighbours popped out of their flats and I told them, yeah I'd seen it all before: this was a 3-point-something earthquake and we can all go to sleep.

But I went back and started looking for reports of it on the news. The BBC was ticker-taping about a tremor in the West Midlands, but I quickly found a Wikipedia article about it being written as I was refreshing the page. It first said it was a Manchester earthquake with unknown magnitude, but as the list of reports came in it quickly settled on being a 4.7 to 5.0 earthquake in England. Turns out it was a 5.3 in Lincolnshire. It's even reported on CNN (they found an American chap living in a timber-frame Tudor house to interview, of course!)

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