By now, you’re probably aware that Ottawa experienced an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 5.0 on the Richter scale earlier this afternoon at about 13:41 Eastern.

I was at work when it hit. For the first few seconds I thought it was just another blast at the construction site across the street, but I quickly revised that assessment to “earthquake” when it didn’t stop and there weren’t any audible “booms” like the other blasts.

The shaking started at a low level and then became much stronger. Then it ebbed to a lower level before it peaked again. I’m not sure exactly how long it went on for, but probably somewhere between 45 and 90 seconds.

After standing in my office for a couple of seconds, I hot footed it over to the door for the firestairs and stood in the doorway. Once it had passed, I headed back to my office, talked to a couple of people and decided that I no longer needed to be in the building so I grabbed my stuff and headed for the stairs. By this point, people from other floors were heading down the stairs, too.

Once out, I headed a safe distance away from the building where I met up with a co-worker and we headed across the street to a cafe while we waited for the chaos to pass.

One of the other buildings where I work had been formally evacuated, so there were a lot of people milling around outside. When we saw them heading back into the building, we headed back to our building and walked up the stairs, rather than taking the elevators.

I talked to my parents who were up at the cottage. They said the cottage creaked and shook and that they felt two distinct peaks in the vibrations. Their cat who was asleep when it hit woke up and was extremely agitated for quite some time afterwards.

I headed over to my parents’ place when I left work to check up and make sure everything was ok there. I noticed that many of the pictures on walls that run roughly east-west were crooked, while those on north-south walls tended to be straighter.

The biggest “damage” I came across was a picture frame on their desk that had fallen over.

At my place, the only casualty was a single picture frame that was slightly askew. 🙂

How did the earthquake affect you?