The beginning of December has been more exciting than we had anticipated. At around 6am this morning, Brigette was fast asleep with a couple of innpugs keeping her warm. Dave was in the office on the internet, reading up on the soapstone wood stoves that we have in the house. [As an aside, Dave is a morning person… Brigette, ehh, not so much].
Just after the furnace kicked on at 6am, Dave felt something “shake the house” for about 3 seconds. His first reaction was, ‘That was an earthquake!’… but then he thought that was probably a little unlikely (and dramatic), especially since we’re still new to the house and not completely familiar with everything. Plus, it was very coincidental that it happened so close to the furnace coming on. He went upstairs and downstairs, inside and outside to see if anything else could account for the house rattling.
But, nothing seemed amiss. No damage or anything wrong with the mechanical systems of the house. So, Dave’s next line of logical reasoning was, “Once you’ve eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, no matter how unlikely, must be true.” So he came down and said to a sleepy Brigette, “I think there was an earthquake!” Brigette rolled the innpugs out of bed, came upstairs, looked online at the news, and sure enough, the US Geological Survey had reported a 3.1 magnitude earthquake at 6:07am, about 30 miles from Asheville.
Then we got to thinking, how many earthquakes has western North Carolina had? We found a map of earthquake epicenters from 1698 to 1997. Turns out that North Carolina isn’t a big earthquake area, so this should probably be a local/regional news item for today.