THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 12, 1996 TAG: 9607120454
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 50 lines
Quakes and 'canes on the same day? So it seemed Thursday.
Even as folks looked skyward, wondering what Hurricane Bertha might do, they felt the earth move from Virginia Beach to Chesapeake.
``It was quite a bit of a shake, for 10 to 15 seconds,'' said Beth Starling, who was at home in the Great Neck section of Virginia Beach. ``The house was shaking, and I just heard everything in it rattle.''
Jessica Rinck said, ``Doors started rattling, and then the whole upstairs shook'' at Coquina Condos near the Oceanfront. ``Everyone was standing in the street looking around. It was really weird.''
And very real.
``It was a small event, two of them actually,'' said Michael Lyle, a geophysicist at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach. ``It was enough to rattle a lot of buildings.''
Lyle said TCC's seismograph recorded both shakes - one at 3:30 p.m. and the other 15 minutes later.
``I don't really want to come out and say it was a seismic event,'' Lyle said, in large part because he, like thousands of other residents, heard a dull rumble when the shaking hit.
``It just kept going on and on,'' Lyle said. ``At first I thought it was thunder.''
Within seconds, his phone started ringing, as did those at area police departments.
``We had tons of calls to our communications department, calls to the point where we just had to tell them we didn't know what it was,'' said Virginia Beach police spokesman Lou Thurston. ``To our knowledge, there was no explosion, or nothing involving the Navy. We just had no idea.''
Both the Navy and the Air Force said their aircraft were not responsible.
``It wasn't anything from our base,'' said Troy Snead, a spokesman for Oceana Naval Air Station, where most jets were being hangared in preparation for Bertha.
A spokesman for Langley Air Force Base in Hampton said its jets flew to Indiana earlier in the day.
And some who experienced the shake doubted that a jet did it.
``I live on the flight path to Oceana, and I know what the planes sound like,'' said Tom Spratt, whose second-floor office near the Oceanfront shook.
``It wasn't anything like that,'' Spratt said. ``It was a real big boom, like some sort of explosion you hear from the distance . . . or a Navy ship's guns.''
Pamela Brooks was in her home in the Cedar Wood subdivision near Great Bridge in Chesapeake when she felt the tremor.
``I kept thinking, `Is this an earthquake or what?''' Brooks said. by CNB