I did not wake up today thinking I would experience my second-ever earthquake. For those of you who live on the West Coast (or Chile or Tokyo), I get that a meager 4.8 earthquake isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s a fun surprise when you’re trying to write The Morning Dump and everything starts shaking.
For those of you who aren’t Twitter/X, don’t live in the Northeast, or just don’t follow the news, you may not know that there was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake around 10:24 am this morning. I was in the middle of trying to get TMD done and was behind after having been sidetracked a bunch of times.
The earthquake, of course, was the ultimate sidetrack. Rather than try to put myself underneath a door-jam or duck under my desk I did what any sensible person would do and went to Twitter to ask if anyone else was feeling the world suddenly get knocked around. And then I got into Slack:
I also called my wife and was like “Yo, I think that was at least a 2.5, though maybe not much greater.” I’m in a low-rise building and she’s in an old-ass house and she said she thought it was closer to a 5.0. She was right!
The building is fine. Everyone is fine. Well, Mercedes has a pipe issue and has to unclog her bathtub every day, but other than that everyone is fine.
This is, as I mentioned, my second earthquake. The first one was indeed a massive blessing as David noted. It’s storytime folks! You’re going to find out how this site came to me thanks to an earthquake.
I have no connection to Virginia and, other than going to Virginia International Raceway for a race, I’d no good sense of the place.
When my wife was looking for a place to get her PhD she applied to a few schools with the program she was looking for and UVA was the best fit, partially because the school offered to pay for her to go there. I went up to visit the school and thought it would be fun to live in a small town that wasn’t a suburb for once in my life.
We moved up in August of 2011 and settled into a little duplex south of campus. My wife and I had only lived there for a couple of weeks when I had a strange morning. She was on grounds doing whatever it is PhD candidates do and I was with my cat, Willie, trying to edit Jalopnik. This would have been easier except my cat was freaking out. As I wrote on Jalopnik:
It all started about an hour ago. I was upstairs working in my office when all of a sudden my cat, who has been acting strangely all day, started making the most awful sound. Translated into English it was something like “Gahhhhhruuuuhammmallll.”
Being the kind cat owner that I am, I rushed downstairs to put a paper towel underneath him so he wouldn’t throw up on the furniture. But there was no throwing up. No anything. And then everything started moving. Here’s how the next 20 seconds played out:
Seconds 0 – 3 The body’s awareness that shit is most likely fucked up.
Seconds 4 – 10 My mind realizes something is wrong, tries to process the possibilities. Cat decides to GTFO.
Seconds 10 – 15 Me looking around for a doorway to stand under. Deciding that I have no good doorways I run towards the back door. I decide I’m not wearing the right shoes for the backyard so I turn around and run towards the street.
Seconds 15- 20 General panic as I run towards the front door.By the time I made it to the street my neighbors had done the same and we were all looking at one another going “Really?”
Willie somehow knew it was happening before I did and, eventually, would throw up every time we got an aftershock, which was a real bummer. That earthquake was a 5.8 magnitude roller and is still the biggest earthquake to strike east of the Mississippi since 1944.
David, as a car-loving student at UVA and as president of the UVA Car Club (which he’d founded), realized I lived in Charlottesville and invited me to come speak to his car club, which I did. In fact, here’s the flyer:
I can understand why David ended up at UVA. When you visit it seems like a cute place, a little college town nestled into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountain. I had a great time in Charlottesville, but I decided pretty early that I didn’t want to live there any longer than we absolutely had to for my wife’s degree. It just wasn’t for us and David, also, didn’t seem to particularly love it.
What I did love was David’s attitude and ambition. I was super impressed with the kid and I offered him an internship and hatched a plan: He wanted to be an OEM engineer, so he’d go work for a car company (he wanted to work for Jeep). After a couple of years of working at Jeep, I’d then hire him for Jalopnik where I intended to be EiC. He’d bring some real-world experience that Jalopnik needed. In the interim, I needed a ride to my buddy’s shop to grab a new rear end for my Merkur.
It mostly went to plan and I eventually brought David on to write Buyer’s Guides, but by that point, I think Patrick was in charge and quickly set him loose writing about his weird adventures. I left shortly after David came onboard and went to try and make car films, which was fun but I missed David and Jason and blogging and spending time anywhere that isn’t the Atlanta airport. Thankfully, the guys introduced me to Beau and Jeff and we were able to get the band back together.
All because of an earthquake. So, remember, earthquakes are your friend.
UPDATE: As requested, here’s a photo of William Jefferson Kitten (aka Willie):
Kitty!!! >^. .^<
My company has a small seismic shake table; during that 2011 earthquake, I initially thought they were running a really gnarly shake on a big component.
Your cat looks a lot like my old cat.
5.8 is no joke.
Depends on which code your building meets and what kind of insurance coverage you got.
If you’re in a building that meets basic earthquake codes and is on solid ground you can probably enjoy the ride.
If not, get under that table!!
FWIW I kinda enjoyed riding out Loma Prieta @ 7. Our 1970s era house came through with no damage, not even a drywall crack even being located quite close to the epicenter. Seeing the damage elsewhere was sobering though.
Best thing about Autopian: You are a nice group of people. Love the background stories. Car articles are pretty good too.
No context for the stud shot of DT posing in front of a python enclosure? I mean the look on his face says “You know what’s up,” but… I don’t. I don’t know what’s up.
Pythons by the pythons.
“So, remember, earthquakes are your friend.”
I’m glad it worked out in this instance but, speaking as a geologist in Seattle, my professional opinion is that this is not, as a rule, true.
Truly enlightening.
Thank you. Usually I charge for this sort of insight.
What about a volcano? Those are friendly, right?
Entirely friendly, right up to the point at which they are not.
Mount St. Helens: Stop and smell the flowers! Now. Until later. You probably have some time.
I was living in the San Francisco bay area during the Loma Prieta quake in ’89. That one was a 6.9 with a 5.2 aftershock. It was – and I swear to science this is not a pun – a very moving experience.
The planet was doing things that my puny human brain couldn’t process. I’m not sure that we as a species are equipped to comprehend adequately the sheer forces involved in an earthquake. I mean, yes, we know about geology and faults and so forth, but the average person isn’t going to grasp the scale of something that can genuinely move a mountain.
Here’s a part of a March 1988 PBS documentary detailing how unprepared SF was for the next quake: https://youtu.be/FaOJBOYDQjk
The good news is that it’s in much better shape now. The bad news is that it’s still effed the next time we have a 7+.
I was 9 years old. Every car alarm on the street went off and my first thought was my friends were smacking all the cars for fun again. Then I saw the power lines playing jump rope and started to really feel it. Only damage in our house was a smashed bottle of wine and one broken window
I once experienced a 4.something earthquake in the middle of England – I was watching TV and felt/heard a loud rumbling that was getting closer. Thinking to myself “damnit, that truck is going way too fast for this street,” I went to the window and the road was completely deserted. It took a solid 30 seconds for my pea-brain to come to the conclusion that a ghost semi hadn’t driven past.
Yeah, same with my first quake. I thought a semi was skidding to a stop nearby.
That 2011 earthquake had me standing on the sidewalk in Philly in only my towel, as I had been in the 4th floor shower at the time. Wish I would have met someone like David through that experience.
Had he been in the same situation, he probably would have offered you some spaghetti.
And DT would have been wearing two floor mats duct taped together instead of a towel.
How did you get from the 4th floor to the sidewalk?
And did you meet anyone interesting on the way?
running down, past my room mates, on the ground floor, who had no idea why I was sprinting out the house in a towel.
This has all the makings of a story for the Onion.
It was a unique experience. The row home I was in was 3 stories tall, but the shower I used was above all 3 stories and over the main stair well. If you bent down to wash your feet you’d hit you head. That earthquake hit and I rattled around like like a roll of nickels in a tin can. I thought my roommates were messing with me, and jumped out and no one was anywhere near me. Grabbed the towel and GTFO.
The force must have traveled primarily towards the northeast, because I remember thinking a really big truck had passed by my parents’ house in an ordinary suburban subdivision about 113 miles southeast of the epicenter and only realized it was a quake when I saw news items on my phone.
Dude, my shower is so screwed. I came home Sunday night to a tub full of water that wasn’t mine. Since then, the shower/tub doesn’t drain at all. One plumber saw it and gave me a quote for $1,200. Another said $800. I finally got two plumbers to come for a fraction of that and they rodded my bathtub drain. There wasn’t anything in there worth noting. There was no obstruction in my apartment’s pipes. So, they started going deeper and finally hit something 40 feet deep. That’s where they found a break or a clog.
Building management has been suuuuuuuuper slow on getting someone to fix this. I mean, where the hell is 40 feet down from my tub, anyway?
If I keep having to manually bail the bathtub twice a day I’m going to be jacked before I know it.
Yikes, that does not sound like fun.
My parents live in a small town in the UK and years ago the main sewer (for a block of about a dozen houses) got blocked. The only reason anyone knew about it was that the guy 6 doors down would burst out onto his front lawn screaming and gagging every time my parents flushed their toilet. Noone knows quite how, but something in the drains was redirecting raw effluent back up into his branch off the main pipe, so his powder room flooded when a precisely calibrated combination of water and excrement made it’s way down the hill. It took several weeks (and a big hole in the poor guys house) before the problem was fixed – I sincerely hope you don’t have to go through that shit (pun intended).
In the UK, isn’t it usually a piece of some ancient Roman ruin getting sucked into the pipes? 😉
I don’t think their neighbourhood is old enough to share sewers with Roman-era coprolites, but the town predates the Despenser War (1321-22) so it could have been something from the middle ages…
Hey! At the last place I lived the pipe in question was only about 150 years old. Basically the first bit of underground pipe, which was probably made of clay just disappeared. The first we knew about it was when foul smelling liquid started bubbling up by our basement door, the fragments of toilet paper betrayed it’s origin.
The first set of plumbers showed up, and dug a massive hole in the garden and failed to find any evidence of a sewer pipe whatsoever, so they retired scratching their heads, and we spent two weeks with a pit full of shit by the house. Eventually they came back, dug the hole even bigger and found the end of the sewer connection, and put a new (plastic) pipe in and all was well.
…Up until a month or so later, when I was walking back to the house on a really hot day and started to smell something really bad. Where our sewer connection passed under the pavement, it had clogged up with the soil that had come from the first repair, and burst up through the pavement, stinking out the whole street, (on a really hot day, in an area where no one has AC in their house so all windows were open). Full credit to the Wessex Water guys, they turned up in an hour, and spent the rest of the day in blazing heat, up to their knees in shit, clearing out the blockage and repairing it. We tried to help by bringing them jugs and jugs of iced water. (Occasionally it’s too hot for even Brits to drink tea). They somehow remained chipper throughout.
tl/dr pray your shitpipe never breaks.
Hey, here in the states, it’s usually b/c they cheaped out when they put it all in when the house was built…6 years ago!
I had a similar experience in a victorian era rental house. Turned out a tree root had grown into the pipe under the back yard.
I have a powered drain auger in my garage that I assume fell off the back of a passing truck. If you’re heading anywhere near Michigan/Indiana/Ohio for the eclipse you’re welcome to come get it and try it out.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/RIDGID-K-400-Drain-Cleaning-Snake-Auger-Machine-C-31-IW-3-8-in-x-50-ft-Cable-inside-Drum-plus-4-Piece-Tool-Set-and-Gloves-26993/202826613
Oh hey, that looks like the machine the second plumber guy used. He also made it down 40 feet and then tried to clear the blockage. Whatever was down there broke his auger. RIP
The blockage is caused by years of broken pieces of giant augers.
The house one of my kids bought a few years ago was “remodeled” by complete cheapskate idiots who did not have a clue how to do anything except make their crap hidden. Wherever possible they did the wrongest thing possible. And the “inspector” was no better and the plumbers called out for a non-draining shower said there is no way the inspector looked under the house in the crawl space at all it was so obvious. The 1 1/2″ ABS drain pipe lead into a 2″ metal pipe with just glue just glumped around the “joint”. This went a little bit, turned 90 degrees, went for about 10 feet and made another 90 degree turn. Some of this “pipe” was 2″ thin wall exhaust ducting. This will be a $3000 estimated fix. The inspector missed that a single wall gas fireplace exhaust was touching the 2x4s during the exit through the wall scorching them. Toilet was not sealed to the drain rotting out the flooring. And the misses goes on and on. Sympathy here for you Mercedes. I’m heading there to do some more on the PapaDo list tomorrow for a couple of weeks.
That is absolutely horrific, but sadly all too common. I knew I was buying a fixer-upper but I had to point out issues to guy who did my home inspection so that he would write them up (so that I could avoid getting hosed on the price), but as far as he was concerned the place was flawless.
This sucks Mercedes. And by your rights as a renter, the owner or landlord is responsible for the maintenance and cost to renters of hiring a plumber if they choose not to respond to your need for help with this.
I lived this sort of nightmare for many years. And was ignorant, but my cuz (a plumber), told me about this aspect of renting.
Maybe you should ask Sheryl about this?
And good luck too. This sucks.
BTW, where we are the city once hooked up the sewer pipes to the water pipes by accident (?) and most people got sewage pumped the wrong way into their homes. Not a good thing. It was a real shot show. Pardon the pun…
Oh yes, I know my landlord is responsible, and they are trying to help me.
The problem is that since the clog is 40-some feet away, the target pipe is somewhere deep in the building. A wall is going to need to come down to fix it. Unfortunately, the building is set up so that landlords/owners take care of anything in the apartments while the association and management company take care of the structure, roof, main plumbing, and whatnot.
So, my landlord and I have been blasting the association all week telling them to fix this stuff. If push comes to shove, and my patience is running out, they will be talking to my wife/lawyer for a second time in a couple of years. The first time ended with me getting a large check…
How are you going to relate an entire story about Willie the cat and not provide a single photo? The cat tax must be paid!
UPDATED!
That’s why this site rocks! Willie looks just as productive and upstanding as my furry shithead 🙂 Thank you!!!
For someone who has never lived in a particularly earthquake prone state, I’ve experienced a surprising number of them! I’ve felt a couple little ones on trips to Northern California and a decent one while in Acapulco, Mexico. I caught one in the Las Vegas airport about 15 minutes after landing, but the biggest was here in Idaho of all places about 4 years ago. Being a physical geography nerd, I thoroughly enjoy the experience every time!
Hey, another Idahoan! I assume you’re talking about the earthquake here in the Treasure Valley? That’s one wasn’t very big, but it was bigger than your others?
If you want to be alarmed by a relatively weak earthquake, a basement toilet is the place to be. Very little isolation from the earth.
I learned this today.
Hahah oh no!
Duly noted!
Yikes!
Good thing the TP is right there for easy clean up
Regular basement toilet, or Pittsburgh toilet?
My home office in my basement has a bathroom with two solid concrete walls. Bring on the earthquakes.
Well, it wasn’t my fart this time. I haven’t been near the northeast since the Oppo Rally.
Could we blame Derp somehow, even though it’s been so long?
I know the smell lingers, but not the initial shockwave. Maybe not.
Was it your fart last time then?
Some say the increasing tectonic activity here is from fracking. Well…they’re partially right. Others know that the rest of it is from Stef’s butt.
I’ve been to California like eight times and not so much as a loud fart. I go to Florida once and there’s a fucking hurricane.
in all fairness, the general state of things in FL is “fucking hurricane”. So probabilities are good.
I mean, they let me shoot a gun. Make of that what you will.
You also could have ridden a motorcycle with no helmet if you’d wanted. Or in certain areas, almost no clothing at all.
I don’t think so both of those sound terribly dangerous.
ATTATT*
*All The Taint, All The Time: the default dress code for Florida Man stealing an alligator from the zoo before offering to trade it for a Waffle House hash brown (smothered and covered).
“Florida Man stealing an alligator from the zoo before offering to trade it for a Waffle House hash brown”
First of all, that only happened once, and it was like 10 years ago. And it was a Wendy’s, not a Waffle House. Also, I believe he was fully clothed.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-man-arrested-allegedly-tossing-alligator-wendys-drive/story?id=36815270
seeeeeeee…you’re talking about a Florida Man who got caught
LET you shoot a gun? Standards must have slipped here. In the old days we required foreigners to shoot a gun within 24 hours of arrival or else face jail time.
The more shocking thing is it took me about fifteen visits to the US to get around to it.
Come to Texas and we’ll let you shoot a machine gun https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/machine-gun-rentals-texas/
Texas is top of the list for my next visit as I’ve never been.
I was right. You must enjoy pain. Freak.
It cleanses the soul.
You went to Florida? WTF? Were you being punished or something?
Kennedy Space Center, Homestead Miami and saw my beloved Dolphins play at home.
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