The train station is near my house, so every once in awhile I wake up and hear an especially noisy or fast train passing. Once in awhile, the house will even shake a tad, and since my bedroom has three exposed walls and is at the top of the house, I'll notice it.
That's what I thought it was when I woke up just before 1 a.m. to the sound of a very deep rumbling so loud it filled the room. But I quickly realized the train would have to be in the garden to make that much noise, and even so it could never make the room vibrate back and forth like it was doing. It was so noisy and the house was shaking so much that I wondered if it was some sort of wind storm. If so, it had to be a tornado. I'll admit that I was frankly terrified, because it felt like the entire, 200-year-old, brick house was about to come down. After a few moments the shaking and rumbling subsided and I ran to the window to see the storm. Yet all was still. Finally, the penny dropped. Was it an earthquake?
Yes, I found out this morning, it was a 5.3 magnitude quake with an epicenter in Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, only 50 miles from Nottingham. Britain had just experienced its strongest earthquake since 1984, and plenty others were terrified, too. As this BBC story reports, there was slight damage to hundreds of homes and people nearest the epicenter actually got of bed and streamed onto the street in their dressing gowns (bathrobes).
My house remained quiet, however, and I almost wondered if I'd dreamed the whole thing. I knew I hadn't, though. It had been too real and had lasted for too long. I peeked out of my room but nobody was up, so I headed to the bathroom. On my way back, a very excited male voice echoed through the corridor with, "Did you feel that?"
It was David, my 23-year-old housemate and English "brother", and he, too, had been hoping someone else would get up to talk about it. He came hurrying down the hall to my room.
"What was that?" I asked. "Do you have earthquakes here?"
"Yes, it was," he said. "We get them every few years. That was massive, wasn't it? And it was so loud! That was the biggest one I've ever felt."
He had a happy gleam in his eye. Once it was over and I knew what it was, I was excited, too.
"Well, we used to get ripples in our swimming pool in Arizona from California quakes, and there were two when I was in Guatemala, but it never even occurred to me you'd get them in England," I said.
This morning I eagerly quizzed 27-year-old Julia about the quake as she brushed her teeth.
"Oh, that," she said. "That was nothing. It wasn't that big."
I began to wonder if I had, indeed, dreamed up the noise and power, especially when I saw "Dad" Pete and asked if he'd felt the earthquake.
"Earthquake?" he repeated, clearly puzzled. "No."
I felt vindicated, though when Sue, my English "mum" heard us chatting.
"It was massive!" she said. "I fell out of bed. But Pete didn't feel a thing. He just asked if I was all right, and clearly he didn't know why. I was so relieved when I heard you and David talking in the hallway and knew I wasn't the only one who felt it. It was scary."
And I, too, was relieved to hear that it was, indeed, a big quake and that I wasn't the only one who was scared.
The only large quake I've felt before was in 2001, when I was a student spending a week volunteering in a rural Guatemalan orphanage. I was in the midst of translating for a group of Americans and Guatemalans when, suddenly, the sidewalk started swaying back and forth. I automatically looked about for the large truck that must be causing the swaying before I remembered that I was in a tiny village with only a few cars.
"Terremoto, terremoto!" the young boys squealed in delight. It turned out that earthquake had a 7.6 magnitude and caused considerable damage in its epicenter of El Salvador. We felt the waves in Guatemala.
The second earthquake on that two-week trip occurred at night, while our group was sleeping in the city of Antigua, but I never even woke up because I was bone-weary from climbing the nearly-12,000-footAtitlan Volcano that day. Our beds even moved across the floor, my roommates said, but I was lost in dreamland.
Last night, however, I was fully awake. I still can't believe the noise! Everyone says a tornado sounds like a freight train, but I never dreamed an earthquake would, too.
About 200 quakes hit Britain each year, but only 10 percent are strong enough to be felt, according to this Associated Press report.
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