Today I got to experience a pretty significant earthquake first hand. I was doing a presentation at Cabin Johns Middle School in Montgomery County, MD on the second floor computer lab. This is a brand new building so I just assumed at first the rumble was just heavy machinery working nearby in the parking lot. The rumble was quite steady but then suddenly grew in intensity. The light fixtures hanging from the ceiling really began to sway. The computers on the desks shifted around on the desks at the greatest point of the shock and then it was over. The teachers in the room with me all just looked at one another and then we started to leave the building in case of an aftershock. Once outside the fear waned as we all just made jokes about the instance and what we were doing. Twitter, Facebook, and text messages was all that anyone could do. The emergency service broadcast was heard playing very loudly from a nearby construction van. The epicenter was in Mineral, Virginia and the affects of the earthquake were felt as far north as New York and Connecticut and as far south as the Carolina’s. There was no major damage to the school building aside from some books falling askew, though DC did sustain varying degrees of damage. I can only imagine that if that was a 5.9 how tremendous and jarring something like the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti would have been. Thankfully there were no major injuries and no fatalities reported due to the earthquake, though the news talking heads didn’t help. Immediately drumming up fear about the Surry Nuclear Power plant in Virginia and safety precautions taken there. Of course due to all that fervor for good ratings with the news stations 495 was turned into a veritable parking lot.