I don’t know who we pissed off here in Texas, but this is getting weird, y’all.
First one hit just after three p.m. and felt like it lasted about five seconds long. Just enough for everyone to stop what they were doing, say “hey, is that an e-holy crap, it’s an earthquake!”, and then a second or two longer so I could think “you are going to stop, right?” For a bit afterwards, I felt dizzy and nauseous, almost certainly because we were up on the fourth floor and got to move quite a bit more than the people on the first. Turned out my office is within five miles of almost all of the quakes.
The second one hit while I was eating dinner at a local restaurant. It felt much less severe but turned out to be stronger by .1 on the Richter scale.
The third one isn’t online yet, but I could feel it for much longer - probably because I’m five more miles further north - nearly twenty seconds of “hey, is that a . . . I’m sure I heard a . . . Yep! that’s a - and there go the cats!”
A lot of people are blaming fracking. It’s certainly been used a lot around here, but my understanding is that most fracking drills to 1-2 miles, while the epicenters of these earthquakes have been around 3 miles down. Doesn’t seem likely.
I heard someone suggest that the implosion of Texas Stadium back in 2010 might have set them off. I managed not to laugh.
There’s also the the Balcones Fault, which was responsible for my very first earthquake - a 2.1 in San Antonio more than 20 years ago. I didn’t feel a thing, but the community college I was taking a summer class at evacuated just the same.
So far, people are treating it like a change in the weather - an interesting topic of conversation, but not reason enough to check your emergency supplies. Geologists from SMU placed new seismometers near where the old stadium stood only yesterday. I get the feeling they’re going to be pulling some late hours.
I wonder what’s next.
