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New Jersey earthquake of 2024
Friday, April 5 2024
Since Gretchen would be spending the night down in Manhattan, I decided to end my brief experiment with substance abstinence today. I began my fall from the wagon with a recreational 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine, which was almost guaranteed to give me a hangover if I drank alcohol (I would and it did).
Gretchen wouldn't be leaving until this afternoon. So this morning she'd arranged a walk in the forest with her friend Greg the librettist and the dogs. They ended up walking all the way to the abandoned houselike building (supposedly a hotel) in the abandoned quarry and both Neville and Charlotte went with them.
Soon after they set out, I was sitting in my wheelchair in front of my computer and heard the noise of moving household items (the kind made by cats when they're being frisky) and felt a sudden light undulation beneath me, a feeling I knew from experience to be the feeling of an earthquake, which I had experienced twice before (once in Charlottesville and once in Los Angeles). I immediately went online to see if there was any news of this, and of course initially there was nothing. But then Google ran a little banner at the top of the empty results saying that shaking had been reported in the area. Eventually the USGS had a map showing an earthquake measuring 4.7 on the richter scale had happened near Lebanon, NJ at 10:23AM. I checked the log of my Google queries and saw that they began at 10:30am, seconds after I'd felt the quake. Since it had taken seven minutes for the vibrations to reach me, it suggests they were traveling at a speed of about 830 miles per hour. That must be the speed of sound through surface rock. Before long, the story of the quake was all over the news and Facebook. It had been stronger in New York City, which is only 50 miles from the epicenter and has lots of structures (such as tall skinny skyscrapers) that amplified its effects. But, unlike an earthquake in 2011 that damaged the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral, there were no reports of damage or injuries.
When Gretchen got home a couple hours later, I told her about the earthquake, but of course she'd been walking and talking when it happened and hadn't noticed anything at all.
This afternoon, I drove out to Home Depot, stopping at the Stewarts on the way to buy a six pack of Voodoo Ranger Juice Force (9.5% alcohol!) so I'd have a road beer. I wanted some more plastic boxes and cover plates allowing me to build out more remote control capabilities at the cabin. I also got some of the fussy details that I need for such projects but never think to get, such as screws for mounting boxes to the basement's concrete walls and little bolts and nuts allowing me to mount relays inside the plastic boxes. I'd tried to buy the latter at the True Value hardware store in Gloversville, but they hadn't had any packages for sale that included both nuts and bolts. (I'd been forced to buy a nut collection and a bolt collection, but then it turned out the bolts were all metric because they were for hanging flatscreen televisions, while the nuts were all imperial, so they couldn't be used together.)
Late in the day, I took a dose of diphenhydramine so I'd fall asleep before drinking too much. It's a good thing I did, because I ended up drinking enough to have a hangover anyway.
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