THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 23, 1995 TAG: 9506230496
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
There was some rockin' and rollin' going on in the normally placid rural reaches of southern Virginia Beach on Thursday, but no one was singing as their homes shook.
It felt like an earthquake, some folks said. Others wondered if Navy jets were breaking the sound barrier nearby. But neither police, the Navy nor seismic experts had a ready answer.
The first tremor came about 10 a.m., said Peggy Farrar who felt the brief, sudden shake in her home in Lago Mar, between Sandbridge and Pungo. A second jolt came about 4:30 p.m.
``It was a quick, vigorous shaking,'' Farrar said. ``I have wooden blinds on my patio doors and it sounded like something hit the door.''
Peter Walker was visiting a friend's home in Sandbridge when he felt the shake Thursday afternoon. ``The table dishes shook like someone had bumped the table - but there was no one there,'' he said. ``I was looking out a picture window at the ocean and the glass just sort of worbled.''
Similar reports of shaking windows came from the Rudee Inlet area at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront where one woman said windows facing the ocean went ``woom, woom, woom'' for a brief moment Thursday afternoon.``I was sitting in my den and my windows rattled bizarrely,'' said Heather Dawson.
The only seismograph in Hampton Roads, based at the Virginia Beach campus of Tidewater Community College, was on the blink Thursday, so there was nothing other than a lot of rattled nerves to verify the event.
Police dispatchers received calls from some curious residents, a few after the morning shake and many more from the afternoon tremor. Most calls came from the Sandbridge, Pungo and Red Mill Farms sections.
Earthquakes are not a common occurrence in Eastern Virginia, which sits on a coastal plain. There simply isn't a whole lot under the region to be moving as happens over fault lines in traditional earthquake zones.
Yet reports of localized tremors have come in from time to time over the years. Many have been verified on the TCC seismograph.
``We used to think it had to do with settling of sediment in the coastal plain,'' said Michael Lyle, assistant division chairman for the Geophysical Sciences Department at TCC.
``A lot of these things happen in the southern part of the city,'' Lyle said Thursday. But while they are sometimes recorded on the TCC seismograph, the only one in the area, a similar monitor at Virginia Tech in Petersburg ``doesn't usually pick them up,'' he said.
``So what is happening is very localized,'' Lyle said. ``Very localized to the southern part of the city and, sometimes, Chesapeake.''
One curiosity Lyle has noted over the years in tracking the tremors is that they ``usually happen in the day, usually between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.''
That might suggest a man-made cause, such as military jets breaking the sound barrier or bombing drills by military aircraft at a Navy bombing range in Dare County, N.C. The Navy has routinely insisted, however, that it is not the cause. And so it was on Thursday.
``As far as I know, nothing out of the normal has been going on,'' said a duty operations officer at the Oceana Naval Air Station.
Given the recurring events, and the region's geography, Lyle is perplexed - and growing very curious.
``We're not really sure what it is,'' he said. But it's happened enough that he's decided that it can no longer be dismissed as a mere oddity or annoyance. He plans to launch a research project on the phenomena. ``We are going to try to find out in a real serious fashion,'' he said. by CNB