Peru Earthquake

[Harpo]

Early reports are coming through of a 7.5 - 7.7 scale earthquake in Peru within the last hour.

 

[Talysia]

A little update on this one...

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Peru capital rocked by earthquake

Apparently, the reports say that up to twenty people have been killed. I hope the toll doesn't rise.

 

[SpaceShip]

With all the natural disasters that seem to be happening with more and more frequency (or does it just seem that way because news reaches us now within minutes rather than days (or even weeks 150 years ago?)) - one wonders if our world is about to implode!

 

[The Ace]

The death toll is now over 300, seemingly a church collapsed during mass. SS, the edges of the Pacific are an earthquake zone, news does travel faster these days but a big one like this was bound to happen sooner or later. I just hope the International Community extracts the digit soon to limit the damage.

 

[j d worthington]

Agreed, Ace.

 

[littlemissattitude]

The death toll is now over 300, seemingly a church collapsed during mass. SS, the edges of the Pacific are an earthquake zone, news does travel faster these days but a big one like this was bound to happen sooner or later. I just hope the International Community extracts the digit soon to limit the damage.

Ace..."Big ones like this" aren't all that rare. I can't remember the exact statistics (it's been a long time since I took geology), but it seems like there are an average of somewhere between 10 and 20 quakes of around the magnitude of the Peru quake (classified as major quakes) every year in the world.

I've felt lots of small quakes (well, I do live in California, after all), and I've been relatively close to the center of two...the San Fernando (or Sylmar) quake of 1971, which was a 6.6, and the Coalinga quake of 1983, which was a 6.5. I was only about 10 miles or so from the center of the San Fernando Quake and was actually thrown halfway across a room during it (not that much fun, believe me, but at least I managed to land on my feet), and while I was probably 40 or 50 miles from the center of the Coalinga quake, it was still felt extremely strongly here. Other big quakes I have felt, even though they were farther away, were the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 (the "World Series" quake in the San Francisco Bay Area) and the Landers quake in the desert of Southern California, at 6.9 and 7.3 respectively, strong enough that I felt them from 100 and probably something over 200 miles away.

But there's a funny thing about the frequency of quakes. Even though I grew up in southern California in an area surrounded by earthquake faults, I don't recall ever feeling one before the San Fernando quake in 1971. I was 14 years old then, and I have a fairly good memory for things like that, but I really have no memory of any before that.

And, an interesting thing about the San Fernando quake...as close to the epicenter of it as we were, the ground actually shook pretty much constantly for about an hour after the main quake (which hit and a few seconds after 6 am, woke me up and, as I said, threw me halfway across the room once I got out of bed...heck of an alarm clock). The aftershocks were frequent and fairly strong for several days, and I actually refused to go to school for two or three days after the thing. Oh...you thought they dismissed school because of the quake? Yeah, right.

Another thing...quakes are noisy. The night of the San Fernando quake, we had one strong aftershock that I actually heard coming for about five minutes before it struck. That was the oddest thing.