I was sitting in my bank managers office, in the process of signing a new loan when the earthquake hit.
I mean, really, I knew I was doing the right thing, consolidating a buch of lines of credit, etc into one loan with a lower interest rate, but to experience an earthquake while you are signing a legal loan paper?!?!...honestly, all I could do was to laugh at the sign from God. Either he thinks I did the right thing, or things are about to get a lot worse!
The office was on the ground floor, with 4 walls of glass looking outside over the gardens, and the intersection, and everything shook. The noise was awesome! Like a plane landing on the roof.
Back at the shop, the staff upstairs ran out of our wooden 160 year old building because the walls were swaying back and forth and the windows rattled alot.
In the end, just a really exciting example of the awesome power of nature, and no damage for us, but my son's college suffered quite a bit of damamge, and the downtown had some damage in higher office towers.
I felt bad for the delivery person, she said the roads were jammed and all the downtown offices evacuated all personelle into the streets, so she got caught up in a mess of people.
Thankfully, no injuries that I know of.
Ottawa is built on a major fault, so the architecture here is designed to withstand earthquakes, and we have lots of little ones. I'm not sure I can remember another 5.5 though.
