DuBose: Rumbling not a huge plow, after all

An earthquake? Here? This column is beginning to read like ‘the earthquake chronicles.’

My first thought was that a huge plow had rumbled past and shook my house, but then I figured that the tremor that got my whole family out of bed at 4 a.m. this morning emanated from the old Wabash Valley fault zone downstate, but I was wrong. And boy, was it strong. Measuring 3.8 on the Richter scale at the epicenter near Pingree Grove, just a few minutes from home, the earthquake rumbled loud and long, about five seconds.

I grabbed my husband and squeezed (luckily for him it was just his armpit), and then the kids sprinted in, followed by the dog. Everyone piled onto the bed except the cat, who thought better of the whole scene.

“This earthquaking never happened to me before,” my daughter Holly said.

That’s right! She slept through the last ones. What must she think? She isn’t saying yet, but after all the Haiti stuff, this must be unnerving for her.  

I’m shocked that with all the Haiti coverage I watched, it never occurred to me to go stand in the door frame or sit in the tub. My first instinct was to huddle. I think I was just too stunned.

A few minutes later, I ran to the computer to check online and confirm my hunch this was indeed an earthquake, but found nothing except the U.S. Geological site where I logged my experience. Then I checked Facebook. Nothing yet, at 4:15. It snowed all night. Perhaps what we heard was just snow thundering off the roof? A busy signal when I made a quick call to the Batavia police was reassuring. It wasn’t just me.  

None of the television news folks mentioned the quake for nearly half-an-hour and when they did I was shocked to learn how close this one was to us. I surfed past CNN, where we spotted Anderson Cooper talking to children in Haiti, and reassured my kids that their earthquake, at 7.0, was much, much worse – plus, their buildings weren’t built to withstand them.