Valles Mines, Jefferson County, MO

It's unusual for me to be awake at that hour, some 30 minutes prior to the first of many squawks from my obnoxious alarm clock.  But for some reason, I was, and seated at my desk in the corner office of my house.  My windows were open, as the temperature had been rather pleasant overnight, and the winds were gusting in advance of a pressing storm front from the west.

The earthquake struck at the very instant a gust of wind blasted my house.  My initial thought was astonishment, as my house had never vibrated in this manner during any previous gust of wind I could recall in my 16 years of owning this property.  The sensation was not unlike sitting immediately adjacent to a jackhammer, and reverberated throughout the house.

It was several minutes later that my ear caught the reporter's voice blaring from the television in the other room announcing the seismic event.  I found this one to be particularly unusual.  While I've lived most of my life in the midwest, I did spend a few years in southern California, an area no stranger to earth movements.  During my time in SoCal, I rode through a number of temblors there of varying intensity, as well as a few rare quakes here along the New Madrid Fault, and noted a pattern that the stronger the quake, the greater span between each wavelength (shake).  That was not the case with this quake, as the magnitude 5.2 here shook with rapidly successive waves.

Damage to my property was very minimal.  No cracks or separations to my foundation or any brickwork.  No cracked or broken glass.  Nothing fell from the shelves.  The only visible damage is to a couple of spots of my eaves, in which already-loose nails were loosened even further.  Considering the magnitude of the quake coupled with the rigid geology of the area, I consider myself fortunate.