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An earthquake struck Ecuador late on Saturday:
A 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck on Ecuador's coast Saturday, leaving at least 28 people dead and causing buildings to shake in cities more than 100 miles away and collapsing an overpass, authorities and witnesses said.
The temblor struck just before 7 p.m. local time (8 p.m. ET) with an epicenter 16 miles south-southeast of the coastal town of Muisne, located on the country's northwestern coast, the U.S. National Geological Survey said. The quake was recorded at a depth of about 12 miles.
USGS.
[Ed. addition.] There were major quakes over the past few days in Japan, as well:
2016-04-15 16:25:06 (UTC) Magnitude: 7.0
2016-04-14 15:03:46 (UTC) Magnitude 6.0
2016-04-14 12:26:36 (UTC) Magnitude 6.2
(Score: 4, Insightful) by martyb on Sunday April 17 2016, @05:56PM
I've experienced an earthquake, twice.
First time, I was on a business trip in California. Didn't know what it was until I was told afterwards. I was in my hotel room and heard what sounded like one of the maids pushing one of their supply carts in a huge hurry down the hallway. This was a minor quake (IIRC a 4.1 or so), and the building was built to shift and defuse the intensity of any land motion. As I was in California, I was kind of expecting/hoping for a (small!) quake so that I could say I had experienced one.
The second time, I was meeting with a bunch of friends. Was outside the building just prior to the time the meeting was to start. There were about 20 of us outside there. At first, i heard what I thought was a very loud jet taking off from a nearby airport. Then the ground started shaking. And shaking. next thought was it was a passing train, but I knew I was not close enough to a rail line for it to be that. It took me better than 15 seconds to finally figure out what it was. Lasted a bit over a minute.
The scary part was there was no way of knowing whether, at any given moment, the quake had crested and was now subsiding, or was still building to an even stronger quake. This was in an area where quakes are very rare. There might be a couple of mention in the entire state over the course of a year, and even those would be of small intensity.
Pardon the pun, but it really shook me up. I was standing on the ground, looking over a landscape I'd seen many times before, but even though I was not walking, I still felt motion... that was VERY disturbing. There was this haunting feeling for the next week or so of waiting for another one to hit. IIRC, this quake was on the order of a 6.2 magnitude.
Thankfully, we experienced no follow-on quakes from this one. That is not always the case. Large quakes are often followed by aftershocks, and, again, there is no way of knowing during the quake what the ultimate intensity or duration will be.
My heart goes out to those in the affected areas. I cannot begin to imagine what kind of mental anguish each aftershock must bring.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @07:15PM
I'm with you on that one.
I've been living in Japan for almost a decade now... there's a noticeable quake at least every few weeks.
The biggest one was, of course, the Tohoku Earthquake of 2011; I was in Tokyo at the time. Seeing 10-floor buildings visibly shake and weave was an... interesting experience. Quite scary. Some of the aftershocks were over magnitude 7, and kept occuring for about a year. The first month or so was... very shaky, with multiple large quakes a day.
To be honest, sometimes I'm not even sure why I stay here, but it's quite nice when there's no earthquakes and/or volcanoes.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 17 2016, @09:07PM
I spent a year on Adak island in Alaska, way out in the Aleutians. My second or third day, the ground shook. No one around me got excited - they just shrugged it off. Tremors and quakes were reported almost on a daily basis, with the weather. You get jaded after awhile.
Some years later, I was in a second floor apartment in a little town near Pittsburgh, Pa. The room moved. I was puzzled, because, we just don't HAVE earthquakes near Pittsburgh. There was construction out in the street, and I wondered if a backhoe had hit something, and transmitted a "tremor" up into the building. Or, maybe one of the mines nearby had an explosion. The evening news announced that there had been an earthquake way out in Missourri.
More years later, I've felt a few mild tremors in Arkansas. Others, I haven't even noticed.
All of that, and I've never experienced a destructive quake.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2016, @01:17AM
Not an earthquake, but felt like one. Staying with friends on the 6th (top) floor in Boston Chinatown. One morning, a 3 story brick building across the alley blew up in a natural gas explosion. Our building shook enough that some of the concrete "trim" bits around the roof parapet fell to the street. At first we thought a truck might have hit our building.
The family that lived in the building that exploded was away. They had one tenant on the top floor and he was in bed, woke up on top of a huge pile of bricks, amazingly OK. Climbed down and went in to work...at a Chinese restaurant.