Earthquake training

As you have probably already seen on the news, the East Coast got its largest magnitude earthquake since World War II, a 5.8 on the Richter Scale that caused even the Pentagon to evacuate. What you may not have realized, however, is that its epicenter was 20 miles away from our lovely little compound here in VA. It was also my first experience with an earthquake. Talk about crazy.

After an emotionally exhausting morning of story after story about persecuted believers [hopefully more stories on that later], we were all sitting like zombies in our chairs, listening to goals and visions, when suddenly, we hear a low rumble. The ground starts to shake, rattling pens, cups, tables...

It's amazing how many thoughts can go through your mind in mere seconds.

"Did someone drop something massive out in the lobby? There's no way that was it. Thunder? No... Jets? No... Holy cow, is this an earthquake?? What are you supposed to do in an earthquake? I was never trained for this! Quick, what's everyone else doing? Getting under the table? Sounds goods to me. *gets under table* Wait, people are running outside. Are you supposed to do that? Oop, they're telling us to evacuate! Run for it!"

By the time we evacuated the building, everything had stopped. What felt like minutes really only lasted 45 seconds. Time is a very strange thing.

All that night, awareness was peaked, and we all had slight panic moments when we felt tremors later that evening.

Then, last night, I woke up around 1 to another rumble and some shaking. I'll be honest, though, I was still in that half-awake/half-dreaming mode, and after I woke up a little more, I didn't know if I had just dreamt it all or if there really was an earthquake. But then this morning, someone confirmed that we had indeed experienced a 4.5 earthquake.

And now, Hurricane Irene is making her way up the East Coast.

Not even six weeks here in VA, and I've experienced my first earthquake and soon my first hurricane. What a week.