Alaska earthquake - September 25, 2010

I went down to Seward, Alaska for a short vacation this week, and woke up to a 5.5 magnitude earthquake just after 4 a.m. Saturday morning. True story about the earthquake: I was in the middle of a dream when I suddenly heard the song "Rock The Boat" playing as someone grabbed my left wrist. I then woke up to hear something rattling in the hotel room, and before I could think of who I was, where I was, or what to do, the earthquake stopped.

Turns out this earthquake was a 5.5 magnitude quake way north of Seward, as shown in the red square in the photo above. Shoot, it was well north of Talkeetna, which is about 200 miles north of Seward, but our hotel was rocking. I waited for an aftershock, never felt one, and went back to sleep.

The funny thing is that several tourists got up and went out to the parking lot. I guess I've gotten used to the earthquakes here, and I assume that if the first wave doesn't kill me, the aftershocks aren't going to kill me either. But since my first earthquake was this spring, I still know what it's like to be new to earthquakes, and getting dressed and going out to the parking lot is probably a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Really, I don't mean to make light of earthquakes, but as I think about it, I'm not sure you can really do much if an earthquake hits while you're sleeping, especially if you're on the third floor of a hotel.