By Alyssa Kornacki, News Reporter
Imagine heading to bed on a Sunday night and worrying about missing your alarm for your class on Monday. Or maybe it was a Monday and you decided to skip class. Or even if you were stressing about finding a parking spot on campus in the morning. Regardless, your last thought would have been that you would have woken up to an earthquake, right? And then, just short of 6 a.m., you woke up to everything shaking around you for a few seconds. Then silence.
Monday morning, students of Canisius College were woken by a 3.8-magnitude earthquake that struck near Buffalo, New York. According to the Buffalo News, the earthquake was the strongest recorded in the area in 40 years, making it the strongest earthquake in most Canisius student’s lives. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the quake offered a reminder that the Buffalo region is situated on a significant fault line, known as the Clarendon-Linden Fault System.
The USGS states on their website, “seismographs are instruments used to record the motion of the ground during an earthquake.” Canisius College has a seismograph of its own, a crude-looking structure located next to the temporary lot behind Lyons Hall. The quake was alarming to people in a region unaccustomed to such shaking.
One undergraduate resident student thought that another student fell on their floor. Other students feared an explosion. “I realized I would be hearing sirens and hearing people screaming if it was an explosion, so when that happened I realized that everything was okay,” said sophomore Gabby Kaderli. Another student, Sara Umbrell, said she was assured she was not crazy for feeling a tremor when she heard her roommate’s dog barking following the earthquake. Another common feeling both on and off campus was fear that a car had crashed into their room; other students didn't feel a thing, sleeping through it. Many commuter students in the surrounding areas can agree that they, too, were startled awake.
Another student who lives off campus had an interesting story. “I live on Meech,” she recounted. “I had been up at 2 a.m. thinking there were ghosts in the house. I told my boyfriend there were ghosts in the house, but he didn’t think so. … Then, when I woke him up to tell him that a bomb went off [referring to the earthquake], he didn’t believe me. We could have perished because he didn’t get up and check, and now I feel vindicated.”
Regardless of what one’s experience with the earthquake was, it was an experience that Buffalo and Canisius will not soon forget.
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