Down the Memory Hole

( – promoted by Sue Prent)

In its coverage of the 5.9 Virginia-centered earthquake this week, on page 8 of the “A” section the Wednesday Burlington Free Press ran a sidebar of “notable” quakes felt in Vermont since 1638. Unfortunately I did not find it on the paper’s website, or there would be a link here. The source was credited as the U.S. Geological Survey.

The list mentioned 14 “documented” quakes “shaking up Vermont.”

Omitted: a 6.0 quake that was felt in Burlington in the early 1980s on a hot summer late-night/early morning. I was there. It felt like some large person had grabbed the side of my bed and was pulling it back an forth in my tiny, closet-sized bedroom in a small apartment a block off North St.

I remember the 72-point type in the Free Press headline a couple of days later as the Geological Survey decided the quake’s magnitude was 6.0.

My spouse remembers it too: her parents were visiting from Wisconsin in  her recently acquired condo a handful of blocks south of Main St., and she was sleeping in the guest room on the floor on a futon.

So why is this event, trumpeted on the front page of the (pre-electronic archives) local daily as measuring a 6.0, not on any of the lists of significant earthquakes in the northeast?

Where did the records go? Why did no one at the Free Press think to physically check its own archives?

Down the memory hole indeed.

9 thoughts on “Down the Memory Hole

  1. I think it was shortly after we moved here in 1983.  

    We were sleeping on the second floor and I hadn’t yet even gotten used to the sway when the wind blew fiercely.  It woke both Mark and me, and it took us a while to figure out what had happened.

    They sold T-shirts after that , which read something like “I survived the Great Vermont Earthquake of 1983(84?)” and my husband bought one and wore it while we were in Tokyo a couple of years later.  

    I remember standing on an elevated train platform there, when a whole group of people began conversing excitedly and gesturing toward us.  Finally one of them came over and asked us about this great Vermont earthquake we had survived.  

    It was hilarious!

  2. and it doesn’t mention that earthquake.

    If it ain’t on the google, then it ain’t on the internets, then it never happened…

  3. I was in Bristol at the time.  I remember our geese and chickens making all kinds of noise while it was happening.

    Exactly 24 earlier the geese and chickens had been making that same amount of noise, the goats and horses were running around their pastures, too.  The animals knew something was coming.

    There was a report from the National Zoo in DC about how the different animals raised warnings as much as 15 minutes before the earthquake hit!

Comments are closed.