So this afternoon I happened to be sitting in the ABC 7 Weather Center making a few graphics for the 6pm show when I heard a deep rumbling and minor rumble in the building.  I turn to my colleague Chris Naille who is the radio meteorologist here and say, "Geez, sounds like a plane just got pretty close to our building...", as our building lies in the flight path of Reagan National Airport.  The only thing is, I heard the same sound another 4 seconds later, so then thought it may have been an explosion or something.  Either way, we thought nothing of it as the sound went away and we went back to work.

About an hour later, after I go downstairs for a cut-in on News Channel 8 and come back upstairs, Chris starts telling me that there were lots of reports of something that sounded like an explosion on WTOP radio.  We go ahead and check the U.S. Geological Survey website and what do you know, we had an earthquake!  Here is a link to the page where the information was located:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Quakes/ld1022071.php#details

It was a relatively weak earthquake with a magnitude of 1.8 on the Richter Scale and was located right by a bunch of my old friends houses as it was in the W.T. Woodson High School area near NOVA Community College on Little River Turnpike.  Many people across the region all the way into DC felt it as the shaking travels very well in the solid bedrock that is located beneath the surface here on the east coast.  This is like comparing the ground to a solid cement slab, where as western quakes don't travel quite as far due to the ground there, which is more like a brick patio with energy dissipating closer to the epicenter.

The largest earthquake in Virginia happened to be in 1897 when a 5.8 hit in Giles County which is along a seismic zone west of Blacksburg, VA.  The last weak quake to hit around the DC area was a 2.1 in Baltimore in 2005, and a 2.5 in Manassas, VA in 1997.  One other memorable one was a 4.5 located west of Richmond in 2003.

Doug and I were researching earthquakes in Virginia before the show and he came across a good article that talked about the 2003 earthquake and history of certain fault lines in Virginia.  You should be sure to check it out.

http://www.wm.edu/geology/virginia/whats_new/QuakeStory.pdf