Is there a firewall that can block a particular connection?

The [US] National Earthquake Information Center [Golden Colorado, US, a suburb of Denver] reports it as

MAG DATE UTC-TIME LAT LON DEPTH region 6.8 2006/01/08 11:34:53 36.204 23.444 48.4 SOUTHERN GREECE

Not as large as the one that hit near Fiji a week ago, but still significant

If the ground were moving 2-3 feet (0.6 to 0.9 meters), you wouldn't be posting for a while yet. Is that what caused your multiple posts?

Over twenty years ago, the Los Angeles Public Broadcasting System station (KCET) produced a one hour special TV show called "Surviving The Big One" (referring to the predicted 8.0+ quake to hit somewhere in the next hundred years or something). It had all kind of recommendations of what to do to prepare for that. I must have seen the show repeated ten times, and kept finding new ideas to implement. When the 1989 Loma Prieta quake (Mg 7.1) hit Northern California about 25 KM from my house, I lost two water glasses. That one killed 60 people, collapsed 2 KM of freeway, dropped a section of the Oakland-Bay bridge, and knocked down more than a thousand houses.

If you live in "earthquake country" then you should be prepared.

Old guy

L O N G M E S S A G E...

Moe Trin, The reason of my post was the funny coincidence of Casey Klc's words who said that "If the roof falls in or the power goes out...". I was thinking to reply with something like "knock wood, I live in an earthquake country" but I didnt, and the next day I experienced the strong earthquake!

It was 2+ feet at its peak for sure, but because of the distance and the depth of the epicentre, the rattle was filtered out and in Athens had become a soft wave of relatively low frequency, but wide ground movement. By the way, the movement was towards one clear direction (north-south, -south was the epicentre) and I was trying to keep balance moving my feet and my body like "dancing" as I said before. Now, if you look on the upper-right corner of your screen, you will notice some tiny characters that make the small word "BETA". THAT caused the double posting! And it showed up the next day instead of "momentarily"!

Did you do something? I've seen on tv that someone -somewhere, made inside his house an iron-cage with very strong construction in which he would get in, in case of a strong earthquake. Inside he had food and water to survive at least one week...

I understand why...

In September 7 1999 I lost my house. That was a 5.9 Richter earthquake but it happened about 10 kilometres from my house and 8km from the surface.The roof didn't fall but the damages were too extensive and too many to repair. I was the only one inside and was struggling to get-out while hearing the tremendous rattle noise mixed with the noise of all kind of things falling and crashing on the floor on my sides like in a war zone. There were 143 dead and thousands became homeless. That was the last strong earthquake (felt in Athens) before this one. But I have experienced another one very strong in my life back in 1981 that shocked and stressed almost anyone I know (including myself) and made most people sleeping in tents for weeks. . And something for the history: One week before the earthquake of 1999 at about 5:30 a.m I was in front of my pc (not in bed) sitting in a desk chair with wheels. Suddenly a completely silent earthquake with a very large ground movement sent me

-still sitting- in the middle of the room in a distance of more than 5 feet (about 1.6m)!!! It was only one main movement. I have never experienced something like this. And I forgot later to look in the news for any reports. All my friends were sleeping so nobody else felt it.

Bad memories that look like Steven Spielberg's special effects...

I am. But I didn't build the cage! :)

Two - three feet of movement is going to be ripping houses apart. During the Loma Prieta quake of 1989, USGS happen to have a seismometer located about 1.4 Km from my house. It recorded a ground movement of

Actually no. You're posting via google groups, and the only thing that shows in the entire article on my server (so I have all NNTP headers as well) is

California has very significant laws about housing construction. The insurance companies have even more rules. If the insurance company is not happy, they won't issue insurance, and that means no one will loan you the money to buy the house in the first place. For example, my house was built in 1952, and the rules in place then required that the frame of the house be attached to the foundation by steel bolts 25 mm diameter and 30 cm long, spaced not more than every 2.4 meters (1" x 12", 8 feet apart). Like Greece, California has earthquakes frequently. Looking at the NEIC web page, I see 18 quakes listed in the state in the past 7 days, though none were important (2.5 to 3.3 on the Richter scale). All the activity last week was to the South, in the Gulf of California, where they had several registering between a 4.4 and 6.6.

Both California and Japan where I've lived take earthquakes seriously. The city of San Francisco was destroyed in 1906, while Los Angeles has had a number of 7.5+ quakes. After two or three of those, the officials get the message that building requirements are more important. For that reason, we have less damage in quakes. For America, the hidden danger is the New Madrid fault - that's the town name, located about 225 KM South of Saint Louis Missouri - right in the middle of the country. The December 1811 and January and February 1812 quakes were estimated at 8.5, and were felt in New York City. If you have a good map of the area, look for Reelfoot Lake at the Northwest corner of the state of Tennessee. That _was_ part of the Mississippi river back then, but it's 5 to 8 KM away from the river now. The reason that fault is a problem is because it has been quiet - and people forget about it. "Earthquakes don't happen here". Yeah, right.

Have a look at the Anchorage quake of 1964.

Neither have I.

Old guy

All earthquakes do not have the same characteristics so you need at least 2 parameters to come to any distructive conclusions: amplitude (movement) and acceleration. I recall that I have felt more "quiet" earthquakes with large but slow movement that give you the feeling of "floating" (no I don't have illusions). These are harmless because of low acceleration and usually they are not reported. Also the local measurments would vary greatly because of many factors. I've read that In almost all cases a soft soil overlying hard rock will amplify the seismic signal because it resonates easilly. And if the resonance frequency of a building is the same with the quake wave's then you have the maximum destruction even with a small earthquake. Another important parameter is the duration because the building or the soil starts to resonate slowly especially if it happens to have a high Q characteristic (low dumping). So the duration will give it the chance to achieve the maximum amplitude.

I used the opera 8.51 (win2000) to post and after the screen that said it will appear "momentarily", nothing happened.The time was about 4:30 p.m (3 hours after the earth quake). I refreshed the page 1 hour later and nothing. Because that happened before, I came back after 3-4 more hours and the post didn't show up. So I thought something went wrong and re-posted. The post(s) appeared finally the other day. So who's fault? I suspected that it must be a compatibility bug of google groups so I sent the last post with IE and it appeared "momentarily".

bolts 25 mm diameter and 30 cm long

Frame and bolts? The houses here are usually made from a skeleton of concrete (with some iron rods inside) and brick walls, materials that are more sensitive to quakes. But all new houses are made of higher ductility with the later rules. The house I would build would have a full strong metal skeleton and walls from light but tough materials.That would be strong enough to withstand any earthquake.

I saw it on Google Local.I imagine that the owners of the nearby fields didn't care at all about the earthquakes because they were seeing their fields growing year by year! :) But exactly the opposite happened to a field of my grandmother's in the island of Kefalonia that was high above the beach and the most part of it ...fell down! The cause was the 7.2 earthquake of 1953 that destroyed almost everything on the Island (350 villages) and killed 473 people. It was a series of 113 earthquakes in 5 days!

Look for "Minoan eruption" in about 1650 b.c from the volcano of Santorini island (or Thera) one of the largest in civilization history. Ejected materials have found in south Africa.