This morning(Friday) around 4:37am the earth shook in southern Illinois and we felt it up here in Wisconsin.  A 5.2 earthquake centered in SE Illinois woke a few people up this morning in the Milwaukee area.

It is strange.  I woke up at that time because I heard the patio furniture moving on our deck.  It does that when the wind picks up out of the east and we have had that wind direction for the past few days and I assumed the wind was picking up and fell right back to sleep.  When Ali woke us up to go to the bathroom at 6am I turned the news on and "Breaking News".  A earthquake happened this morning.

I did not feel , and I was buried under rumble, but I assume the noise form the patio furniture was due to the earthquake.  The wind was very light this morning.

Fortunately no one was injured.   I read about the New Madrid Earthquake Zone in the Midwest and how active it used to be in the early 1800s when I was in school.  Over 4 months in 1811 and 1812, 4 of the Unites States largest earthquakes shook the entire country.  If the Richter Scale existed back then , some experts say they were off the chart...one would have recorded a 10.  A major earthquake is in the 6.4 range.  One earthquake in 1812 was so intense it rang church bells in Boston, sunk the land around the area by 20 feet, leveled forests for hundreds of miles, created new lakes and actually changed the route of the Mississippi River.  Now that is a major earthquake.  There were no fatalities since the area was sparsely populated.  If these earthquakes were to happen today, and experts warn they will one day, the devastation and death toll would be catastrophic.  Cities like Memphis, St Louis and Indianapolis would sustain major damage.  Chicago and Milwaukee would also be affected.  So the question needs to be asked...Are we prepared?

By the way, today is also the anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.