I was laying in bed this morning in the sleepwaking haze I like to spend my mornings in, when the whole house shook, just once. Not really a shaking, just a single shudder, as if somebody had backed a truck enthusiastically into the poles that hold it up in front. The brass light fixture over my bed gave a slight ringing sound. Then, again, 15 minutes later, the same thing. It sounded just before as if a jet plane were flying by to the north. That didn’t strike me as odd until later: we’re fairly directly east of the airport, and planes never fly near us.
So that was it: my first earthquakes, a 3.0 and a 3.4, centered seven and a half miles north of us, next to the Calaveras reservoir, and three miles underground.
One of my co-workers who lives in downtown San Jose didn’t even feel it, but I’m in a good spot for earthquakes: the Calaveras fault, on which the earthquake today occurred, is 2.5 miles to the East, and the Hayward fault, with which it meets just to the south, is a few hundred yards to the west.
The largest recent quake in the bay area, a 5.6 in October of 2007, was actually called the Alum Rock quake after the neighborhood I live in; for bonus points, we’re smack-dab in the middle of the fault zone voted most likely to fuck up your day.
So, there’s that.
Puts a little edge in my day, anyway.
