Karyn, I am soooo scared of earthquakes. I felt 2 big ones ...first one in Romania a 7.5. It was about 32y.ago. It happened at 10 pm and if I would have been home and in bed I would probably have died. Part of the wall where my headboard was, fell on my pillow. I was young and I did not went to bed so early LOL. I was at some friends house when it hit and I did not know what happened. In the beginning I thought a war started. A friend of mine was begging me to run outside but I could not move. I was parallelized. I was like in a trance and I was picturing a house I've seen in a movie who was shaking and than fell. In that moment I realized that the house might fell and I ran outside. I could not see anything just a lot of dust everywhere, bricks and building material falling around me. It was a miracle I was not hit. It was a lot of damages, lots of tall buildings( 10 stories) fell to the ground and thousands of people died .I can not tell you the terror I went through until I located my parents ,my sisters and brother. We were living in different parts of the city. There was no light, no telephone or transportation working. We reunite sometimes during the night. Thanks God we were all alive, not hurt just scared. The second big one (about 7) was in California about 20y ago when I was 3 month pregnant. I was in a supermarket paying for my groceries when it hit. This time I knew better and I ran out as fast as I could. Lucky me I was not through the aisles to be hit by falling products and selves .I was closed to the door and avoided the crowd. Another big thanks to God that my pregnancy was not affected. The smallest earthquake scares me to death. Pat

Whew, I'm glad there doesn't appear to be any serious damage from yesterday's quake. Being a CA native, I've experienced hundreds of quakes but the largest was the 1971 Sylmar jolt. Right after it happened, the USGS said it was 6.8 but it was later revised down to 6.6. Still, it was fierce! I was 20 years old, newly married, & living on the second floor of an older apartment building in Tustin near the Santa Ana line. My memories are that the quake hit at 6:05 a.m.; but Wiki says it was 6:00:55 a.m. I was standing at the bathroom sink brushing my teeth getting ready to head off to work. My husband was at the other end of the apartment. At first, neither of us much reacted but as the quake built in intensity he yelled at me to get out of the building. By that time, everything in the apartment was toppled over, the kitchen looked like a war zone, & our bed had flung itself through the sliding glass doors leading to our miniscule balcony. We ran outside barefoot & still in our nightclothes. The shaking lasted one full minute...a very long time. We got outside & there were lots of other people all of us scared. A hole opened up in the road about 3' long & a few inches wide lifting the pavement. Stucco was flying off the apartment building into the street. We decided we were better off back inside. It all happened so quickly it's like a blur in my memories. Anyway, all TV & radio stations were knocked off the air so there was no communication in the first few minutes. Within 30 minutes the stations were back on the air with emergency power. Still though, nobody knew where the epicenter was or how bad the quake had been. Shortly after the quake there was an aftershock that was almost as large as the initial quake but it didn't last as long. Communications just weren't as good in '71 as they are now. I called my Dad at his office knowing he would have been on the road at the time of the quake. Mom had been killed 5 months earlier & Dad was still reeling from that so I knew the quake would have really jarred him. He'd been on the 605 freeway at the Cerritos exit when the quake hit. It moved his car to the right 3 lanes of traffic. Dad said he thought he'd had a heart attack. It took him a couple minutes to realize what had happened. Back then, the 605 was not heavily traveled & there weren't a lot of other cars around so no accidents. Both my husband & I went to work as normal because we didn't know what else to do? I was working for Allergan Pharmaceuticals & our offices were still in the old facility in Tustin. The Irvine tower was nearing completion & we were scheduled to move into the new facility within a month. I got to work & couldn't get inside...too much damage to the building. We all just hung around outside talking for hours. Most of us had sustained damage at home & didn't want to return there & it felt safer in a group. We still didn't know how bad it had been. There just wasn't the news helicopters & stuff then as now. By mid-morning, we knew it was bad. The VA hospital collapsed & lots of freeway overpasses were down. I remember the worry that the dam was going to break & flood thousands. I eventually went back home but by then the fire department was at our building & wouldn't let anybody inside. So, I went to where my husband worked. They were all gathered outside in the parking lot. He worked for Varian (an electronic company) & there were tons of overhead wires in the building that had come down so they couldn't get inside their facility either. We just hung out there in the parking lot for a couple hours huddled around our car radios. Dad's house had some damage but it was superficial so we went to his place to stay the night. Dad's secretary lived in Huntington Beach. Her place was damaged to the point she was afraid to stay overnight in the house (she was a widow) so she was also at Dad's. We had to find a new apartment. Ours was too damaged to live in for months. We were so lucky though. Had that quake hit an hour later the roads would have been packed with commuters on their way to work. The death toll would have been much greater. The movie 'Earthquake' came out about a year later (not sure of exactly when?). It was about the quake. We went to see it at the Pantages Theater. They had placed vibrators under all of the seats & at the moment the quake hit in the movie they turned on the vibrators! Everybody in the theater screamed!! It was just like going through the quake again...I've not liked disaster movies since. Once you've been through a big quake like this one or that horrible Loma Prieta quake you just never forget it. And your senses get very fine tuned. Years later, I was living in southern NH. I woke up early in the morning & shook my now DH awake saying, "Wake UP! We've just had an earthquake!" He told me I was dreaming...go back to sleep. Well, the next morning, sure enough...we heard on the morning news there'd been a quake at the Canadian border. DH has never experienced a quake so I guess that's why he didn't sense it like I did? Everything is so much better today. Better building codes, communications, news availability, emergency services, etc. If you drive from LA & head over the Grapevine you can still see the fault breaks from the '71 quake. I was last over the Grapevine Jan. '06 & pointed them out to DH. I am very glad everybody's OK & that damage is minimal. /tricia

Frostedc, I'm about 100 miles south east of Peoria, and about 60 miles north of epicenter now stated as Mt. Carmel, Illinois which is on the border of Indiana, just across Wabash river is Vincennes, IN. It appears not much structural damage reported from any of the state that felt it. The last report I heard- about 8:30 AM that it was revised from a 5.4 to a 5.2 on the Richter scale. Jan

We sure felt it! (Just north of Toronto). My dining room table, buffet and hutch were shaking like crazy. I thought I was having a dizzy spell but it was the house that was shaking, not me! It was wild! We have the G8 + G20 summits going on in Toronto right now, it's the first day. My first thought, after I realized that I wasn't fainting, was that it was an terrorist attack. To make matters even more interesting, we are now on a tornado watch. Just north of us was declared a state of emergency and there has been considerable damage to some parts around the Midland area. Now if all of this was happening on a tv show, I'd think "how unrealistic". LOL Earthquate (5.5) and tornado's all on the same day and in the city that the world leaders are in. I wonder what their first thoughts were ... ...so how was YOUR day? :-) BJ