Early this afternoon, we felt effects
of the earthquake (7.7) that hit central Burma/Myanmar. (My rough guess is that it was around 600
miles from us.) It brought down a high
building under construction in northern Bangkok and has shaken a lot of folks
up, many of whom were evacuated into the street from high buildings. This doesn’t happen much in Thailand.
I didn’t feel anything and didn’t even know there was an earthquake
until Tuk came into my ground-floor kitchen very excited. I had just returned from a grocery shopping
trip and was busy unloading stuff from my pack.
I was on my feet and didn’t feel any ground motion at all. The only unusual thing to me immediately upon
my return was a noise from above in my second-floor area. I thought it might be Tuk up there using a
broom and being clumsy and noisy about it, hitting the wooden handle against
the wall or stair railings – yet she rarely goes up there, so I was mildly puzzled.
Then Tuk comes into my kitchen exclaiming about an earthquake. She went on about sitting in her ground-floor
living room and thinking that she was dizzy; then she saw overhead powerlines
outside swaying and heard the glass sliding doors on her living room rattle.
I was skeptical at first. In my
second-floor bedroom, I’ve often felt my bed sway any time big trucks and buses
rumbled by on the street below. It feels
just like a mild earthquake. Our old
brick building sits on soft alluvial sediments, and it shakes like jelly when
big vehicles go by, so I had always wondered what the effect of an actual
earthquake would be like. Scanning the
news, BBC was first to break the news that an earthquake in Burma had indeed affected
Bangkok. And I think this explains the
unusual knocking noises coming from upstairs.
Nothing in the house seems to have been damaged or even disrupted,
nothing knocked over, etc.
-Zenwind.
.
