I was recollecting my first few days in our house here on the west coast tonight. We took possession of the house on September 2, 2000, and I was out here on a work assignment so I moved in well before Irene, our furniture, or our cats arrived. During my first week in the house I experienced my first noticeable earthquake. It was a little thing, and at the time I thought a big truck had driven by outside- I was alerted to it being something a bit different by the fact that the light fixture in our kitchen nook started swaying slightly.

After remembering this, I went looking to find some record of the event to correlate to my memory. I found what I was looking for at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network web page. From that page you can look at “current” seismic data from dozens of sensors across the region, plus automatically generated “incident” pages for any quake that qualifies as “signficant”. Here is the page for the incident I recall: it took place on September 10, and was a magnitude 3.2 quake about 80 km south-west of us.

It is comforting to know that my recollection of the event isn’t too far off the mark. Better, though, is finding a place online to check seismic data in my locale. There are probably better sources, maybe even something that is Canadian, but the PNSN site seems to have a good collection of data in a reasonably digestible format.