Students react to Indiana earthquake

Graduate student Sanjay Mohanty said he thought the earthquake that shook the Midwest early Friday morning was a dream. Mohanty, who has never been in an earthquake, said he was disappointed he slept through it. But some of his friends didn’t.\n“A couple of friends told me they thought it was the washing machine,” he said. “My buddy James thought his mom was up at 5:30 doing laundry.”\nMichael Hamburger, IU professor of geological sciences, said the 5.2-magnitude earthquake hit southern Illinois, but people as far west as Kansas and as far north as Michigan felt it. The quake, which was centered 38 miles north of Evansville, was the strongest in southern Illinois since 1968. \nThe U.S. Geological Survey recorded the first tremor at 5:30 a.m. and aftershocks, the largest of which registered a 4.5 on the Richter scale, at 11:15 a.m. Angel Gutierrez, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey, said so far, his organization has received 37,000 reports of the earthquake, some as far south as Atlanta. \nAlthough strong earthquakes such as this one are rare, they aren’t unheard of, Gutierrez said.\n“There was an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.1 in 1987 in Illinois,” he said. “This earthquake had a after shocker with a magnitude of 4.6 at 10:14 a.m., which is very large for an after shock.”\nWhile the quake woke some students, others snoozed through it.\n“I had a lot of text messages and voice mails when I woke up,” said sophomore Andrew Dahlen, who lives in Collins. “I’m from Maryland, so I (had) never experienced an earthquake.”\nJunior Christine Stewart, a resident assistant on the second floor of Read Center, said she woke up when her bed started shaking.\n“I was a little confused,” she said. “It felt like the building was collapsing.”\nStewart said many people she talked to thought the rumbling was the result of the construction at Read.\nAt the time, Stewart went to check on the residents on her floor, and only two were out in the hallway. The dorms have procedures students should follow in the event of an earthquake, Stewart said. But because earthquakes don’t often happen, students don’t take them seriously. \nLaw student Manolis Boulukos said he woke up when the earthquake hit and, at first, blamed the rattling on his downstairs neighbors. He then found his 4-year-old daughter and a friend who was staying the night standing in his bedroom doorway.\n“(My daughter) wasn’t that afraid at first, but after we told her it was an earthquake, that was when she started crying,” Boulukos said.