Earthquake gently rocks campus

Rachael Lavin was on her way to work as a community assistant in South Campus Commons 1 early Friday morning when "the entire building shook."

"I'm from California, so I'm used to earthquakes," said Lavin, a senior studio art major. "The first thing I thought was, ‘Wait, that's an earthquake.'"

People were shaken awake throughout the Washington area at 5:04 a.m. July 16 by a 3.6-magnitude quake centered about 20 miles from the campus in Montgomery County; others slept through it. No damage was reported.

Earthquakes don't happen frequently in this state, and when they do, they are usually smaller than last week's event, according to Laurent Montesi, an assistant geology professor.

"We have an earthquake maybe every three years," Montesi said. The last one, in May 2008, registered a magnitude of 1.8.

Friday's earthquake had the largest magnitude of any earthquake in the state since the U.S. Geological Survey began keeping records in 1974.

"It's unprecedented here," said Montesi, adding some earthquakes should still be expected in the area.

There are seismic belts in Pennsylvania and Virginia, Montesi said. Given that "there's a bull's eye north and south of us," he said, quakes are bound to happen.

Shira Rosenthal, a junior architecture major, was sleeping when the earthquake shook her Brookville home, approximately 10 miles from the epicenter. The bulletin board in her room was shaking when she woke up, Rosenthal said.

"I thought my brother dropped something heavy downstairs," she said. "He's usually up late."

Rosenthal said she only learned what had happened when she saw her friends' Facebook statuses about an earthquake.

Lavin said it's "weird having an earthquake in Maryland," but it "wasn't major."

Though it wasn't huge, Anton Dorsey, a junior criminology major living in New Leonardtown, still wishes he felt the quake.

"I was in bed asleep in my apartment," Dorsey said. Like Rosenthal, Dorsey only found out about the earthquake through Facebook later in the day.

"I'm disappointed that I missed it," Dorsey said. "It would have been cool to say I was in an earthquake."

Media reports described thousands of emergency calls about the earthquake throughout the Eastern Seaboard; spokespeople for university and Prince George's County police said they knew of no 911 calls from the College Park area.

Nonetheless, University Police spokesman Paul Dillon sent out a campuswide e-mail alert Friday with "earthquake preparation information" in case of any powerful aftershocks.

A utility pole that fell across Rossborough Lane on Thursday evening had rotted out and was unrelated to the earthquake, Dillon added.

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