Shakin’ in DC

With a 5.8 quake August 23^rd on the east coast, traveling fast with lots of granite and other massive rock formations deep under that terrain, chaos and a momentary expectation of a terrorist attack brought our nation’s capital to an abrupt halt. Most downtown office buildings were immediately evacuated. Cabinet officers were whisked to safety “just in case.” The White House area was immediately cordoned off (even though the President was vacationing hundreds of miles north), and federal employees flooded the streets. A nearby nuclear power plant in Virginia (the epicenter was actually in Virginia) was taken off line fairly quickly. When public transportation got back into operation, the lines to the subway and busses were intolerably long. My son, who is an investment officer with the Department of Energy, elected to make the long walk instead, first to check on his fiancée (a medical student at George Washington University) and then to his apartment in central D.C.

I don’t see any Evangelicals telling us that God was punishing Washington for its recent debt-ceiling crisis or the complete unwillingness of our two political parties to be willing to work together. The Episcopal National Cathedral was damaged – the tips of three beautiful spires fell off (see above) – as was the Washington Monument, the old Smithsonian Castle and even parts of the National Mall. Didn’t seem like a violent retribution from an angry deity, but for those of in California, a 5.8 is barely news. At least our buildings are generally built to tolerate a modicum of shaking and baking.

Well, not so fast: there’s New York’s Rabbi Yehuda Levin who feels there was punishment involved: “In a video uploaded to YouTube, Levin says gay rights legislation, like the gay marriage law passed in New York, are responsible for earthquakes, like the one that struck Washington, D.C. [August 23^rd]....‘The Talmud states, 'You have shaken your male member in a place where it doesn't belong. I too, will shake the Earth,'’ Levin says.” Huffington Post, August 24^th. Oy!

Back to the real world. DC schools were closed, lots of federal employees were authorized to “telecommute” or take a quick leave of absence, and here’s a partial list of federal buildings in DC that were closed the next day: Federal Aviation Administration (headquarters),Department of Health and Human Services (Hubert Humphrey Building), Department of Labor (Frances Perkins Building), Independent U.S. Government Offices (National Building Museum), National Endowment for the Arts (Post Office Old), Department of Agriculture (Agriculture South), Department of Homeland Security (Nebraska Avenue Complex) and the Department of the Interior (headquarters).

Even as building and bridge inspectors make the rounds to insure safety, there is little long-term concern for the DC area, where hurricanes are more of a threat than such tumblers. According to the Tacoma Park Patch (August 23^rd): “This is metropolitan Washington’s second quake in just over a year. A 3.6-magnitude tremor—less than one-tenth the strength of today’s quake—struck five kilometers beneath Gaithersburg last July…Maryland’s earthquake history dates back to a 30-second quake reported in Annapolis in 1758…USGS archives list no significant Maryland-based seismic events since an 1885 quake near the Frederick County-Loudoun County border. Reports over the last few decades have come from earthquakes in neighboring states, including:

o A 4.3-magnitude earthquake near Elgood, W. Va. in 1969

o A 1972 tremor centered in Wilmington, Del.

o A minor earthquake near the Delaware-New Jersey-Pennsylvania border in 1973”

So many other communities in the United States face natural disasters that make the shaker in the DC area seem trivial by comparison, but then except at primary/election time, they do not suffer from a plague of politicians that infests Washington on a regular and consistent basis… except at primary/election time.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder what most Americans really would have preferred to have happened to Washington instead of a pretty innocuous earthquake.