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Mississimia t1_ja01wna wrote

People might kind of make fun of this, but the only earthquakes I've experienced in California were around this magnitude, and its scary as hell when you wake up and your bed is shaking.

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MitsyEyedMourning t1_ja03td9 wrote

I live in MD and when you live in an area not known for tremors they will really freak you out. In California a small shake is nothing but tomorrow's hottest new dance routine, in MD it might as well be the sky falling.

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NettingStick t1_ja1zgkl wrote

I've known a bunch of people from the PNW and California who move to the southeast and freak out at thunderstorms. Like, there's not even a tornado watch. This is just spicy sky.

Just depends on what you're used to.

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wyvernx02 t1_ja46ewy wrote

West coast people freak out over a severe thunderstorm.

Midwesterners and Southerners go outside when the tornado siren goes off to try and see it.

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peepjynx t1_ja15rqs wrote

It's fine. We're currently experiencing a blizzard and I'd imagine people in MD could handle that much better than us.

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strik3r2k8 t1_ja0sx4x wrote

It’s not even a 4 pointer, go back to sleep.

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truecore t1_ja1enza wrote

Most people reading this won't realize that the magnitude system is literally orders of magnitudes in power. So a 4.0 is 10x as strong as a 3.0. A 3.8 is weak as fuck. But when you live in brick houses I guess it could still be dangerous.

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DorisCrockford t1_ja55rf9 wrote

You got that right. Brick houses are definitely not what you want to be in during an earthquake. You don't even want to be sleeping in the living room next to a brick chimney.

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yagmot t1_ja2ffz0 wrote

The Richter scale is a shitty way to judge what people actually experience. The key factor is the depth, which I rarely see reported in the news. You can have a relatively low magnitude quake near the surface that causes a lot of shaking or a high magnitude quake quite deep that doesn’t. This one was VERY shallow (1.8mi deep) which explains why such a low magnitude quake felt so strong to those folks.

Here in Japan we use the Shindo scale which measures intensity at the surface. I really wish the rest of the world would adopt it because it makes it very simple for people to comprehend just how bad a quake was in a particular area.

To put things in perspective, we experience M3+ quakes on a very frequent basis without feeling anything at the surface.

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PhoenixReborn t1_ja56f6h wrote

The USGS tracker usually has a Modified Mercalli intensity map when there's enough data.

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GrannysPartyMerkin t1_ja1r5rp wrote

I’ve lived here 33 years. I think they’re fun, the rock back and forth is cool. Worst thing that’s ever happened to me from an earthquake was that I got out of work early once.

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Mississimia t1_ja2dsg1 wrote

I only lived there for 5 years, it was always super disconcerting. But you're lucky that nothing bad happened in 33 years! I know people who were not so lucky in 94.

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Zidane62 t1_ja24pgj wrote

Here in Japan, we’re pretty used to it. It’s crazy at first. Everything is shaking around you and everyone is just going about their day.

Now I’ll be sitting here gaming and ignoring my shelves swaying back and forth a bit.

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ajaxandsofi t1_ja4l5ef wrote

The sound of the world around you shaking adds a new dimension of terror as well. Then when things fall around you, if you're awake before they do, reality of the situation hits and you are suddenly alert and clear. Whether or not you're terrified is up to you.

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DorisCrockford t1_ja5609t wrote

I never thought much of them until 1989. That one got my attention.

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