Grabbed this shot walking along Beechmont Avenue in Mount Washington on a recent spring evening. Since the weather broke, I’ve found myself walking the streets and sidewalks of this suburb-in-a-city neighborhood and often surprised by how much I like it there. It’s not downtown, no doubt, but with its town center and rather plentiful Kroger store, it’s a real nice place to be.
Fountain Square - especially with all this sunny weather lately - is looking great. I love the warmer months downtown the best.
Ron, Suzanne and Joe at Lavomatic, originally uploaded by hjoew.
Ron (left) invited Suzanne (Fountain Square events manager, whom I’d never met) and I for an impromptu lunch at Over-the-Rhine’s newest eatery, Lavomatic (a Jean-Robert de Cavel production). And it was wonderful. The food was super delicious, the conversation was great and it seemed half of Cincinnati was also having lunch there with us. I love days like that!
Below is a recording of an uncut phone interview recorded around 6:45 a.m. today (4/18/2008) with University of Cincinnati Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Bahram Shahrooz, PhD. Shahrooz is an expert on earthquake building design and earthquakes. I caught him at home about an hour after the earthquake that was felt in Cincinnati.
I apologize, but the audio is not perfect. I recorded it with my handheld digital recorder, which is mono and has fairly low quality.
Hamilton County and city of Cincinnati 911 dispatchers have reported several calls regarding the earthquake, but no reports of damage.
Cincinnati dispatchers said that several calls came to them this morning, many not sure what was going on. A dispatcher said that many callers thought a burglar was trying to break into their home. A Hamilton County dispatcher said many people thought there was an explosion, while others wondered if they were delusional when they felt their homes shaking.
The Hamilton County dispatcher I spoke to, who started her shift at 7 a.m. and is on her first day back after maternity leave. She said that those dispatchers who were already at the Hamilton Avenue communications center in Colerain Township were asked to clock-in early and man the phones because they were getting so many calls.
“If anything else weird happens today I am going to take that as a sign and go home and be with my kids,” she said, laughing. “I guess this is the thrill of the job.”
OK, folks, I’m watching the FOX19, which might be the problem. But instead of doing just a tiny bit of reporting about why this earthquake may have happened, they are instead taking phone calls and reading e-mails from viewers talking about what they felt. Who cares!
The Enquirer story posted at 6 a.m. gives little details that were available on the Internet seconds after the earthquake. This drives me batty! (Or, I suppose, you could just read Report This!)
Wikipedia has a pretty good (it appears) page on Richter scale magnitudes and what damage can be expected in such earthquakes.
I got this map here.
That means we felt the earthquake pretty much (or within one minute) of it actually happening. That puts us pretty close and probably felt pretty close to a 5.4 magnitude here, just a little less.
At 5:396 a.m. this morning the USGS is reporting an earthquake was epicentered in Illinois… Back in 2000 I wrote a piece for The Cincinnati Enquirer about earthquakes hitting in Cincinnati. But basically, the New Madrid seismic zone was responsible for an earthquake so big that it rung church bells in Boston, Mass Charleston, S.C.
Why? Unlike the earthquakes in California (where I lived for the better part of three years and never felt one earthquake ever and was told they happen - small ones - everyday), the plates here are very, very large and cover thousands of miles. So, when the earth’s crust slips in Illinois we feel it here - or in Boston.
This morning’s trembler came in two waves. The first one woke me up and I looked around to see the exposed ventilation swinging from the ceiling. I could hear pots clinging together. Then it stopped. About 30 seconds later , a smaller, less intense quake shook everything again.
It was a little unsettling. From my West Coast friends I have heard about how scary they can be - and now I can agree, from experience. I live in a building that is more than 150 years old and the first thing I thought was it might coming tumbling down.
We just had an earthquake in Cincinnati. It was centered on the New Madrid faultline along the Ohio River near Evansville, Ind., according to the real-time United States Geological Survey Web site.
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