Man i was taking a nap after a 16 hour shift at work yesterday and only thing that woke me up was my brother running into my room all excited about this earthquake.

 

I live about 20 miles away from the epicenter and was at work about 40 miles away and it shook the building pretty good!

 

While 5.9 is nothing to sneeze at, we used to have to go around and straighten my pictures every Saturday when the family lived in LA. No big deal. Although, I don't think they use the same building codes, materials or construction processes on the EC as they do in the West. Crazy, stuff, though. I got out of the house. I'd say my Old Town Alexandria townhome was moving about 4" back and forth.

CW

 

felt it here in long island

 

Kind of crazy..I thought it was just someone next door doing some crazy work...til it kept going and everyone was getting up saying WTF???

 

The big THING in the current residential building code is shear wall panels for wind loads we seen over the past few years. Fairfax started it and the rest followed. Killing our contract completion dates because we are not allowed to cover exterior walls until all trades are inspected for proper wall penetrations. I can see this now, hitting the monthly gov meetings and spiralling out of control. Earthquake rated residential codes will be upon us within the next 5 years. Adding tens of thousands in design and iimplementation.

 

Anyone know why this happened from a geological point of view. CA is running along the St. Andreas fault line where as here in this area I know that plate shifts ever happen... any word on how/why this occured?

 

They can pretty much happen anywhere anytime. We just so happen to be located in an area with not that much seismic activity.

 

Here's a picture of the damage at my office I was under-whelmed

 

Unrelated? Possibly, but CO had a 4.0 yesterday morning, and there was a 7.0 today in Peru.

Anyway, generally, the East Coast is on a hard granite base, whereas CA has relatively soft soil, IIRC. There is a fault line in VA, and it's constantly active, but they're relatively small events. However, we also have clay soil, which means that any vibrations travel vast distances. I can't recall much from from Geology classes long ago, but it's certainly better to have frequent, smaller events, rather than rare, big ones.

CW