The Reno earthquake jitters

from esteemed #1 son in northern nevada...

You might be a Northwest Reno resident If …

# While shopping for a new dining room table, you bring the entire family to RC Willey [well-known local furniture store] to make sure you all fit underneath it.

# “Family Game Night” includes copious rounds of Uno, Scrabble and “Guess the Magnitude.”

# The USGS Web site is your home page, and you check the UNR Seismology site as frequently as you check your e-mail.

# You believe the “Triangle of Life” is so last week.

# You can now hear the earthquakes before they arrive.

# You are spackling and painting your walls — why not, there aren’t any pictures on them anyhow.

# You get mad at the kids when they’re snacking out of the earthquake bin in the garage.

# “I’ve felt 25 earthquakes today?” you reflect. “What a great day!”

# Your children know what “Rabbit in the hole” means.

# The “Living with Earthquakes in Nevada” publication that you found last week in the RGJ has become your coffee-table book.

# You know the exact latitude and longitude of your home.

# You can adeptly convert UTC to Pacific Daylight Time.

# Earthquake insurance brochures and estimates are in your “To File” stack.

# You debate the philosophical underpinnings of “aftershock or foreshock” with your family and neighbors.

# Wall hangings = floor leanings.

# You have narrowed down the lag time between an earthquake and the moment the magnitude posts to the UNR Seismo site to 11 minutes and 42 seconds – give or take.

# Your car is parked in your driveway — and not because there’s no room in the garage.

# You take a shower in your swim suit; after all, who wants to be naked when the “Big One” hits?

# On your nightstand next to the latest Eckhart Tolle book and your Carmex is a Maglite flashlight and a crescent wrench you’ll use to turn off the gas.

# The pharmacist doesn’t even ask if you need the briefing about Xanax anymore.

only 27 more days and i'll be back there...

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Earthquakes in northern Nevada

from my son's email on friday morning about what's been happening in reno...

[We] had two (4 total, only felt 2) fairly big quakes yesterday 4.2 & 3.8, rocked the hospital at about 3:45 and 3:55. There was another about 6 pm and 1 am this morning but I didn’t feel those. If you go on to the USGS web site, you will have to do some poking around but you can see that we actually have been having up to as many as 50 small quakes a day in the area for the past couple of weeks. Those were the first quakes [my wife] and I had been in so they were both fun and scary at the same time.

this greeted me this morning on yahoo news...

Scientists urged residents of northern Nevada's largest city to prepare for a bigger event as the area continued rumbling Saturday after the largest earthquake in a two-month-long series of temblors.

More than 100 aftershocks were recorded on the western edge of the city after a magnitude 4.7 quake hit Friday night, the strongest quake around Reno since one measuring 5.2 in 1953, said researchers at the seismological laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The latest quake swept store shelves clean, cracked walls in homes and dislodged rocks on hillsides, but there were no reports of injuries or widespread major damage.

Seismologists said the recent activity is unusual because the quakes started out small and continue to build in strength. The normal pattern is for a main quake followed by smaller aftershocks.

"A magnitude 6 quake wouldn't be a scientific surprise," John Anderson, director of the seismological lab, said Saturday. "We certainly hope residents are taking the threat seriously after last night."

here's the usgs earthquake chart for the past 2 1/2 hours, all of them in the reno area...

MAP 3.1 2008/04/26 20:56:00 38.538N 117.217W 0.0 52 km (32 mi) N of Tonopah, NV
map 0.7 2008/04/26 20:46:43 39.550N 119.939W 4.0 4 km ( 3 mi) NNE of Verdi-Mogul, NV
map 1.7 2008/04/26 20:43:07 37.781N 122.199W 9.5 3 km ( 2 mi) ESE of Oakland, CA
map 1.5 2008/04/26 20:37:26 37.568N 118.867W 8.4 12 km ( 8 mi) SE of Mammoth Lakes, CA
map 1.0 2008/04/26 20:36:56 38.848N 122.773W 1.4 5 km ( 3 mi) WNW of Cobb, CA
map 1.4 2008/04/26 20:36:46 39.530N 119.886W 8.0 6 km ( 3 mi) W of Reno, NV
map 0.7 2008/04/26 20:33:51 39.509N 119.938W 0.0 2 km ( 1 mi) ESE of Verdi-Mogul, NV
map 0.8 2008/04/26 20:18:57 39.491N 119.859W 0.0 5 km ( 3 mi) SW of Reno, NV
map 0.7 2008/04/26 19:55:35 39.530N 119.886W 0.0 6 km ( 3 mi) W of Reno, NV
map 1.4 2008/04/26 19:36:25 32.637N 116.040W 10.5 12 km ( 7 mi) SSW of Ocotillo, CA
map 1.7 2008/04/26 19:35:04 39.551N 119.835W 8.0 3 km ( 2 mi) NNW of Reno, NV
map 1.1 2008/04/26 19:27:51 39.510N 119.886W 0.0 6 km ( 4 mi) WSW of Reno, NV
map 1.0 2008/04/26 19:09:04 39.510N 119.912W 4.0 4 km ( 2 mi) E of Verdi-Mogul, NV
map 0.6 2008/04/26 19:06:24 39.550N 119.939W 0.0 4 km ( 3 mi) NNE of Verdi-Mogul, NV
map 0.5 2008/04/26 18:47:10 39.510N 119.886W 0.0 6 km ( 4 mi) WSW of Reno, NV
MAP 3.0 2008/04/26 18:37:55 39.901N 115.707W 16.0 48 km (30 mi) NNE of Eureka, NV

it was only a little less than two months ago that the 6.0 quake hit wells in northeastern nevada...

The quakes around Reno began a week after a magnitude 6 temblor in the northern Nevada town of Wells, near the Utah border.

"around reno" is a relative term, given that wells is nearly 400 miles away...

ah, well... something to look forward to when i get back there in early june...

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Saturday photoblogging... [UPDATE]

last night, the snow came down very hard and very fast, the wind blew a gale, my son shoveled the driveway twice, and there was nearly a foot before bedtime, at which time the stars came out, we lost power for about four hours, and i went to sleep after blowing out a candle... (remember, folks, this is the high DESERT of NEVADA, on the western edge of the great basin, just east of the sierra foothills...)

i rolled out of bed about 6:30 this morning, shook myself awake, and headed out about 6:45, shovel in hand... i got the driveway cleared almost all the way down to the street where each shovel-full became increasingly heavier due to the "slush factor..." (anyone who's ever lived in snow country can tell you what that means...) it was at that point my son came out and i gladly handed him the shovel to finish the last of it, while i grabbed my camera... i snapped a few shots, and headed back in for morning coffee... for an old fart, it's a VERY invigorating way to start the day...!


7:30 a.m.

notice how much snow had already accumulated on the portion of the driveway i had already shoveled...


10:15 a.m.

it stopped snowing about 9 a.m., the sun came out, the clouds almost disappeared, and the sky was intensely blue... as you can barely see in the upper right corner of the photo above, the clouds had already started to roll back in by 10... now, it's 2:25 p.m., it's been snowing hard again for the past hour, and they're calling for another foot on top of the almost three we already have...... i'm going to wait for a while yet before heading back out to tackle the driveway - AGAIN...

naturally, CALIFORNIA gets all the goddam headlines... < sigh >

[UPDATE]

< gasp > it's 4 p.m. and i just finished shoveling almost 4 more inches off the driveway... that makes 4 times in the past 18 hours, two for me and two for my son... in one of life's ironies, our next-door neighbor, who works for the national weather service, was out shoveling his driveway for the nth time too... he worked the midnight shift last night and had one hell of a time getting back and forth to work... the good news is that it's stopped snowing - for now...

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Sunday photoblogging - wolf lichen in the Sierra

we got going early this morning while it was still almost chilly and before the usual wind started up... the humboldt-toiyabe national forest* boundary is only a few miles from the house, just inside the california border...

(* 6.3 million acres makes it the largest forest in the lower 48 states)

the eastern sierra foothills are mostly ponderosa pine with an occasional aspen grove thrown in here and there... it's the start of the rain shadow and the forest is customarily crackling dry and even more so now because of a serious lack of precipitation over the winter and extending through this spring...

we explored a crystal-quartz quarry and then wandered a bit through the woods, our feet barely touching the dirt through a thick carpet of pine needles... the thick lichen on many of the tree branches caught my eye...





i went web surfing to see if i could identify it and this is as close as i came... whaddaya think...? is it a match...?

Letharia vulpina ("wolf lichen") on incense cedar bark, western slope of the Sierra Nevada, California.

This was the most widely used dye lichen for indigenous peoples in western North America, used from the Rockies to the Pacific coast, from California to Alaska. Some groups also made paint from it.

This lichen is sufficiently poisonous that the Achomawi in Northern California used it to make poison arrowheads, but the Okanagan-Colville made a weak tea of it to treat internal problems, and it was a Blackfoot remedy for stomach disorders.

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