ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Wednesday, February 27th 2008

Mandatory Earthquake story No.2

To pardon the pun, I too was a little shaken by the events at 1am when the world went wobbly for five seconds. For me it’s a pain and pleasure thing – I like thunderstorms but don’t want to get hit by half a million volts, I like being on top of hills in a strong gale but down want to be blown off my feet.

Those five seconds of shaking are a fantastic reminder that we’re not in control, Mother Nature can still give us a wake up call when she feels like it.

More fun was had in the 20 minutes after; as I lie awake wired on adrenalin, wondering whether what had happened had actually happened, I switched on the TV to find out which news channel would be the first to get the BREAKING NEWS graphic up first!

Sky News won by a whisker albeit they were struggling to fill airspace with newsworthy news.

A phone call with a woman in Lincoln, with similar experiences to my own, revealed that the earthquake was as minor as my first predictions confirmed. Nothing damaged, nothing broken, a book had fallen sideways on her bookshelf (not actually off the shelf).

The next guy from Sutton-on-sea had heard lots of ducks quacking just prior to the quake. I think this guy’s onto something, maybe San-fran doesn’t need complex and delicate seismic monitoring equipment – just a group of early-warning ducks!

By this time the newsreader was clearly grasping to get hold of anything remotely sensational – the third caller recounted how she looked outside straight after the tremors to see all her neighbours’ bedroom lights illuminating (probably to the same resounding ‘What the f…?’ as my household) but as this was now some 25 minutes later everyone had gone back to bed.

And with that, so did I. Happy that a UK earthquake will hopefully never be as devastating as those living on more turbulent parts of the Earth.

It wasn’t a pleasant nights sleep, I live next to the canal, the canal with all the ducks!