Earthquake!

At 5:37am on Friday, April, 18, 2008, Wesley & Sara were sleeping peacefully in their bed when they were awakened by someone shaking their bed. Being good Midwesterners, Wesley & Sara knew that was the only thing it could be because there couldn't really be an earthquake happening in Indiana, right?

Wrong.

From the local paper:

A magnitude 5.2 earthquake that shook much of the Midwest rattled Greater Lafayette at 5:37 a.m. Friday.
Several aftershocks followed, including one at 11:14 a.m. with a magnitude of 4.6, which was felt in Lafayette.
The quake was centered six miles from West Salem, Illinois, about 144 miles southwest of Lafayette. It was felt 450 miles northwest of the epicenter and in such distant cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Des Moines, Iowa.
Experts say the quake and aftershocks happened in the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone, a series of underground faults in southwestern Indiana and southeastern Illinois, said Larry Braile, a seismologist at Purdue University. He said a quake of such size is unusual for this area of the country.
The quake is believed to have involved an extension of the New Madrid fault, a network of deep cracks in the earth's surface, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The fault is at the center of the nation's most active seismic zone east of the Rockies, something that's known to Midwest residents, even if they forget it now and then. The last severe earthquake in the region was a 5.0 quake in 2002.
No significant damage was reported in Greater Lafayette or in Indiana.

After realizing that there was, in fact, no one shaking the bed, Sara knew that it was an earthquake, since she had experienced several while growing up in Tennessee. Wesley, however, was pretty "rattled" (I know, I know, that was bad...), since he had never experienced an earthquake before. Since he lived all over the place as a child, we guess he was just never in the right place at the right time!

An aftershock occured later that day while Wesley was on the 4th floor of Beering Hall. He described the experience as "crazy," since it felt as if the whole building was swaying. Sara thought the earthquake event was "just so cool!"