Eastcoast Earthquake

Washington Monument too. Heard it will be closed indefinitely.

After surverying the damage Quozl, I found a piece of mortar that my wife says fell from the brick in our living room during the quake. My God man, it's as big as my finger! My finger!

Mr. Bistro wrote: After surverying the damage Quozl, I found a piece of mortar that my wife says fell from the brick in our living room during the quake. My God man, it's as big as my finger! My finger!

Yea, I think there's going to be a real boom in the tuckpointing and mortar touch-up industry for the next couple of weeks most places outside of Louisa and Culpeper, both of which suffered pretty heavy property damage to a lot of older brickwork (Civil War-era downtowns in particular) and some road infrastructure.

I will say that I did actually have a momentary scare out of this basic non-event though. The office I was in today is directly across the street from the front gate of the National Reconnaissance Office. For a Super Secret Spy Agency[tm], the facility is about as close to wide open as you can be these days, right off the street [unlike the Pentagon or CIA which have a mile of parking and frontage road before you hit the actual facility], with a big sign in front that says...NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE HERE-> like every good Super Secret Spy Agency should (I'm not joking about any of that. If the signs weren't indication enough, the 9 billion SATCOM links all over the place and the 1,000 people in uniform heading in and out of the joint might be some kind of clue that it's An Important US Military Installation). So, when hit with a suddenly shaking and rumbling building, there was this momentary but very real fear that some fuckwit decided to drive an SUV full of ANFO into the guard shack across the street to make an explosive political statement. It's a little weird finding myself saying "gee, glad it was only an earthquake."



EDIT: Doesn't SkaBaron live somewhere near Culpeper [maybe it was Stafford]? He checked in today? He may be one of those closest FA:Tties to the epicenter

Aw, thanks Dogmatix - Live near Fredericksburg in Spotsylvania County, but the house was fine other than a few pictures askew and the wife's cosmetics toppled over.

Downtown DC though... UGH. We evacuated along with everyone else with almost no where to go. Hung out for an hour before going back and gettin dimissed. Since I live far far away from where I work, and I happened to drive in (rarity), I was one of the buffoons in the gridlock.

If this city every needed - like 9/11 needed - to evacuate in a "hurry" - PSSH! Good freakin luck. Commentators on the radio talked about how DC failed yet again on this disaster management. OPM is run by a couple of monkeys with a dart board as far as Fed Gov dimissals go. Every time the same thing.

I even heard the Nuclear Regulatory Committee couldnt get ahold of anyone at OPM to tell them they'd been erroneously listed as closed today. Would love to hear their answering machine message...

So - Dogmatix had it all for DC. Earthquake scary, but not bad. Resulting traffic, scary and bad.

EDIT: oh, and I know that Culpeper declared a state of emergency. While they suffered damage, I think it was more of a bureaucratic move.