Tremors
Last night around 7:15 p.m., we felt a small tremor. It wasn’t the first time. Last month we felt two quakes, also in the early evening. I was kind of upset that the newspaper never reported it. Like the murder in Potrero two Sundays ago. A man was gutted with a knife in front of a bar in the middle of the afternoon; apparently the first murder in the history of town. They were Nicas, the Ticos commented, as a way to explain it. Whatever the nationality, the murder was never mentioned in the newspaper. I guess what happens in this small town is not relevant to the main population in the Central Valley; or, the news was kept secret in order not to scare away tourists. In any case, I couldn’t count on La Nación to find out the magnitude or the epicenter of the quake. Fortunately there are other resources. The site for OVSICORI (Costa Rica’s Volcanology and Seismology Observatory), www.ovsicori.una.ac.cr/ has real-time seismographs in two dozen seismic stations. After the quake, I went online, checked out the seismograph at Rincón La Vieja, the closest volcano to us, and confirmed that the needle went berserk at exactly the time we felt it. Weeks later, in their “10 most recent quakes” page, I could see that the quake originated 52 km west of Tamarindo, in the Pacific Ocean, and its magnitude was 4.9. Newsworthy, if you ask me. Since the table with quakes felt by the population is not updated daily, or weekly, I’ll have to wait to see what magnitude last night’s quake was. My guess, around 3.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009