Shaken, but not stirred!

[Octothorpe]

We had an unusual event this morning: a 3.8 earthquake, here in Northern Illinois. It hit at 4am, with a great boom and much shaking (or so it seemed at the time). The dear one and I could not go back to sleep afterward.

It's unusual here (but not unknown), so I feel the need to ask: do you have any, or many, earthquakes where you reside?

[Stefan]

No earthquakes here in Pennsylvania. At least not since I was born.

[Jamt]

I lived in a rented house on the outskirts of Katmandu in 1988 and woke up in the middle of the night not understanding what was going on. Somehow I did the right thing and me and my girlfriend found ourselves standing in the doorway (supposed to be the safe place to be) and I could not understand what the hell was going on, the Nepalese where all out screaming in the night and everything was weird so we went back to bed in some kind of mild disgust. Next morning I learned about the earthquake at the café where we took breakfast and that it had been a big one, a lot of life lost. The reason the Nepalese made a commotion was that they were in the process of scaring away bad spirits that was causing the earthquake. It makes kind of sense. The reason that I could not comprehend stuff at the moment it happened might be because of heavy smoking the night before.

[Brynhild]

Tremors in Australia aren't unusual, because a fault line runs off our coast. Earthquakes are more common in New Zealand, though. The worst earthquake that Australia ever experienced was the one which occurred in Newcastle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Newcastle_earthquake) back in 1989. I happened be at work in Sydney and on the 13th floor of a rather old building at the time. It was probably the most scary five seconds of my life. I didn't know what happened until after I went home and heard it on the news. My then boyfriend was down at Goulburn, quite a few hundred kilometres away, and they felt it down there.