Every year, it seems, an earthquake hits Lake County. The latest was a 2.5 near Madison earlier this week. One News 5 Facebook Page commenter reports, “We felt it – things moved in house.” Another wrote, “We definitely felt it on Ford Road. It was quick. Sounded like something hit the house.” Another said, “I didn't feel ANYTHING here in Parma, but my cat had the zoomies at around that time. Maybe she sensed it.”
I have no way of verifying whether that Parma cat was aware of the earthquake, but for the purposes of making this piece 100 percent more interesting, I’ll add that one heads-up feline 50 miles away allegedly sensed the earthquake and warned its human with precautionary zoomies, according to a source.
These earthquakes are rarely strong. Every couple decades we get a “bigger” one like the 4.0 earthquake in 2019, the 4.5 out of Pennsylvania in 1998 and the 4.8 in 1986, which caused a record number of local zoomies. Lucky for us, most of our quakes are in the 1-2 range, which, on the scale of things that Northeast Ohioans worry about puts them somewhere between the Cincinnati Bengals and property taxes.
In our house in eastern Cuyahoga County, they can sometimes be felt. If we’re any indication, this is how most Northeastern Ohioans react:
* A MASSIVE BLOCK OF EARTH THAT HAS BEEN WAITING 10,000 YEARS MOVES *
Husband: What was that?
Wife: Probably nothing.
Husband: I felt something.
Wife: Maybe a truck.
Husband: I’ll check the house.
* HUSBAND CHECKS THE HOUSE AND IS RELIEVED TO FIND NO ADDITIONAL PROPERTY TAXES *
Husband: Guess it was a truck.
Wife: Could be something you ate.
Husband: The sauerkraut balls.
Wife: Yeah.
* MASSIVE BLOCK OF EARTH SIGHS DEEPLY *
Here in Ohio, our earthquakes are Midwestern in every sense. They’re not here to bother anyone. They’re the types of earthquakes that would wait at a four-way stop and let everyone go first. They’d bring a Jello salad to the party even though Jean and Bob said not to. Our earthquakes whisper, “Ope, sorry, just gonna scooch by” when they are scooching by.
Our rain? VERY dramatic. Our rain spends half a day foreshadowing its arrival with wind and darkness, and when it descends, it wouldn’t 100 percent shock you if scenes from the Book of Revelations played out in your yard. Our summer sun is also dramatic. It doesn’t leave until it destroys our lawns, crops and skin. Even our wind is like, I hope you don’t like the modern conveniences made possible by electricity because I’m going to spoil your freezer food and you will have to buy new French bread pizza, suckas.
In California, where I lived for 15 years, the earthquakes are flat-out scary. We had one during Easter Sunday dinner that shook the living room so long I wondered, “What if this never ends and the world just shakes forever — could that happen?” Then it finally stopped, and we all continued eating ham while trying not to think about how the apartment building almost fell over and killed us. Holiday cooking tip: There is no ham more delicious than a ham seasoned with contemplation of one’s own mortality.
Based on past years, we can probably expect another earthquake in Northeast Ohio soon. When it hits, social media comment sections will once again offer interesting theories about what causes these quakes. Some will say it happens when the lake gets too much precipitation. Others say it’s the salt mines. Maybe the government. I’ll toss another one out there – nature. It’s possible, and even likely, these earthquakes are caused by nature.
A few years back, News 5 interviewed Case Western Reserve professor Steven Hauck about why this part of the country gets earthquakes when other regions are more deserving. (Florida, for example.) Hauck said we are in the middle of a tectonic plate (defined by scientists as “a plate that is tectonic”). The edges are out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and the West Coast, making earthquakes less common here. We get them, he said, where the area was once covered with a glacier.
“There are small movements, possibly from the Earth starting to rise back up after the last time an ice sheet was here," Hauck said. "Those are still slight movements that over time build up stress and overcome the friction on those faults.”
The professor said there is no way to predict when an earthquake will strike, and they are infrequent.
Doom zoomies remain rare.
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