I was at home this morning, when I noticed some loud noise which at first seemed like someone banging on the walls or the ceiling, and I immediately wondered “why is there suddenly a construction project on my condo roof? What the hell are they doing up there?” It was sudden and jarring, and as I got up to investigate, I noticed my massive cabinet holding hundreds of books (similar to the AI-generated image as seen above) shaking as if it might fall over – and still wondered who was doing such a disruptive construction project on my condo building?
I went outside to take a look, and ran into several other neighbors who were outside checking things out as well, and one of them said “we just had an earthquake!” It made sense in the context of seeing my massive cabinet shaking, but made no sense in regard to my location: an earthquake in New Jersey???
My phone quickly started pinging with incoming texts – friends and family were also experiencing the earthquake, everywhere from south Jersey to New York City to north Jersey to Albany and even a friend in Connecticut! The NY Times later reported online that the 4.8 magnitude earthquake stretched from Philadelphia to Boston, and referred to it as “… a harmless novelty in a part of the country unaccustomed to seismic shaking.” That’s certainly true for me, the only other time I’ve ever experienced an earthquake was while visiting Washington D.C. in 2011, which seemed briefer than this one, which may have been about 8-10 seconds that I experienced here today.
Considering I wanted to generate an image using A.I. to help illustrate this post, I was curious to see what A.I. would do with a prompt for “earthquake in NYC.” Here’s a vision of that, although I’m very thankful that such a scenario did not happen, but it was interesting and a bit scary to read that the majority of the approximately one million buildings located in New York City were constructed before 2000 and therefore have no design features with earthquakes in mind.
It’s been said that aftershocks could happen, or of course another earthquake … it’s almost impossible to know. It’s not like one can prepare for it, it just happens. Let’s hope it doesn’t.