Yeah, I felt it. I had just made a chocolate run and was sitting at a busy intersection in West Hartford when my car started to rock the way it does when the windshield wipers are going full blast, but they weren’t on. “What the hell?” I thought. I looked in the rearview mirror and wondered if the big truck behind me was somehow shaking my car. Then the light changed. I forgot about it and headed to the office.
I drove to the Courant down Asylum Avenue, and all the office workers were out on the sidewalk. “What the hell?” I thought. “What is this, a mass fire drill?” I didn’t know about the earthquake until I pulled into the paper’s parking lot, and NPR announced the breaking news. I rode the elevator with TV news anchor Brent Hardin, who had had a similar experience.
The newsroom was abuzz; people were joking and, of course, making light of it. FoxCT interrupted its regular programming, and weatherman Geoff Fox talked about the big earthquake—5.9 on the Richter scale, 10.0 on the New England excitement scale. I’ll bet that in California people don’t even stop typing for a 5.9.
