We just had an earthquake here ... 4.5 and only lasted about maybe 15 or 20 seconds. I live in Richmond, Virginia -- that's just not supposed to happen here. Buildings are not supposed to shake.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsUS/Quakes/uscdbf.htm

I love the USGS maps that plot the size like this one.

Compare and contrast the amount of activity listed on that map (Virginia) to mine...

Wussies.

Oh wow, I take that back. Look at Alaska...

But see you get the nice weather in trade ... It's cold as crap AND the earth is shaking here.

That certainly is strange! I've lived in Virginia my whole life and I've never been in an earthquake. We see a lot of storms, but no earthquakes!

Crazy! What did you think it was at first?

When the tremors started I though there was just some construction downstairs, then when the big jolt hit, I thought something blew up ... It's just such a foreign feeling. Pretty damn scary actually.

I've been through a total of 5 or so in the 7 years i've been in SF. 3 of which were severe enough to get my fight or flight response going to the point that i could feel the adrenaline rush more than 15 minutes afterward. I said the same thing the first time it happened... where i'm from the farking ground isn't supposed to MOVE. I'll never forget that first one... i was sitting at my computer and my monitor slowly started vibrating... I nearly shat myself.

Ha, a 4.5 is barely even feelable. It has to get a bit higher than that, maybe like a 5, before it becomes fun and interesting. If over 6 it stops becoming fun again though.

I remember being in a diner during a minor (4-ish) aftershock of one of the big SoCal earthquakes some years ago. It happened to be on a major interstate highway outside of L.A., and there were quite a bit of out of towners. It is wasn't obvious who was local and who was not until the earthquake; while the out of towners were freaking out and running around well after the earthquake ended, the locals went back to their food and conversations. I'll have to hand to this one old regular at the counter though, who didn't even leave his barstool or take his attention away from his food, and whose only apparent concession to the ongoing earthquake was to lift up his cup of coffee so it wouldn't spill.

whose only apparent concession to the ongoing earthquake was to lift up his cup of coffee so it wouldn't spill.

A calm, cool and collected EQ veteran, no doubt...

and whose only apparent concession to the ongoing earthquake was to lift up his cup of coffee so it wouldn't spill.

LOL. That's good.

The closest I have been to experiencing an earthquake was when Seattle had that one a couple of years ago. I was in a conference call from the UK to Seattle when the quake started.

One of the guys at the other end, said "What was that ?". Then we heard was sounded like someone shaking the desk the phone was on.

Then one of guys in Seattle said "I think its an earthquake".

At this point we laughed and started winding them up, because we thought they were joking. Shortly after that we heard someone say "Are we supposed to get under the desk or something ?" then the line went dead.

We still thought they were having a joke with us. When we found we couldn't call them back or get through to anyone else in the Seattle offices we realised it was real.

It took us more than an hour before we managed to raise them again, by which time we were convinced they were all dead and we were feeling very guilty

Here in So Cal we've been through several, the main one being Northridge -- man, THAT was an earthquake. Earthquakes always seem to happen down here in the wee mornings of the hour, like they did with Northridge. My father used to take charge in these situations and would end up running down the hall in his boxers yelling, "GOD IS GREAT", "GOD IS GREAT" in arabic or pushto, whichever language the earthquake happened to trigger. He'd wake us the hell up and start running outside. The man was under the impression that it is much safer to be outside then inside...because the house might colapse. This was always very confusing to me as a child, because in California schools they always had earthquake drills where they'd tell you the only safe place to be was under a desk or in a doorway -- the doorway concept is something i still have trouble understanding.

So we'd be outside, cold and half naked while the ground beneath our feet was shaking. Even though the epicenter of the quake was quite a ways from us, we totally felt it's effects. The creepiest thing was watching the electric/telephone poles swaying this way and that... and then watching the lines snap apart. That is what caused most of the damage in our neighboorhood, down wires causing all sorts of fires.

Ahhh earthquakes. Now that i think about it, we really havn't had a significant one recently and i think we're about due. crap.

whose only apparent concession to the ongoing earthquake was to lift up his cup of coffee so it wouldn't spill.

A calm, cool and collected EQ veteran, no doubt...

Nah.. Just a man who had his priorities straight.

(I hate to say it, but the ONE earthquake I was 'in', I slept thru. The one that hit the border of AL/GA earlier this year. I think.. I still feel bad about sleeping thru the thing. Sheesh.)
Me.

I was an undergrad at U.C. Berkeley. It was my first year of school when the famous Loma Prieta quake happened. One game of the baseball world series between San Francisco and Oakland was just about to get started. The time was maybe 5:00pm or so. I was walking back from class with some friends. It felt as if somebody had simply pulled the rug out from beneath me (i.e., the world jerked two feet to the right) and that was it. Then, a second later, every bell in the clock tower rang at once, presumably a result of the shockwave travelling up the tower. I thought the whole thing quite entertaining, and my friends gave me crap for not being a real Californian. Then we saw the smoke coming up from the distance where a gas station had somehow blown up. They say that it's quite lucky that most people had gotten to wherever they intended to be to watch the World Series game, resulting in significantly less traffic on the freeways, where one section of double-decker freeway in Oakland collapsed, and a segment of the Bay Bridge fell down.

Fast forward 30 minutes later, and imagine 14 people crammed into a tiny dorm room watching the news reports on a 13" small television. "We feel another aftershock coming on." Two seconds later, your ears were telling you "simple harmonic motion" and your eyes were saying "no, everything's staying put." Very, very disturbing. The phones were worthless. You'd pick up the phone and maybe get a dial tone after ten seconds. I now understand that, in disasters, they try to reserve phone bandwidth for outbound calls from the disaster area, but even then there wasn't enough. The Internet, however, continued without incident and I e-mailed my parents to let them know I was okay.

The next day at school was quite a scene. The administration decided, at the last minute, to continue classes the next day. My first class was at 8am (uggh) in the Physics building. This is one of the older buildings on campus. There was plaster from the walls and ceilings all over the floor, with big cracks visible everywhere. Later in the day, I had an anthropology class with a professor who was something of an expert on Thai culture. He had an entire art exhibit's worth of Thai artifacts in his house and he described running around catching things as they were falling over.