My own thoughts on the quake: I heard a weird rumble and felt a jolt in the floor for about five seconds, went "What the heck was that?"Josh Shaffer wrote:RALEIGH -- Earthquakes seem to be following some students at Exploris Middle School.
On Tuesday afternoon, eight Japanese students had just arrived in Raleigh for a visit with their sister school, Exploris, when the walls started shaking.
It was an eerie echo of last March, when eight Exploris students were seconds from landing in Tokyo when a massive, tsunami-triggering earthquake forced their plane to seek safety in Osaka.
How many middle-schoolers can say they lived through two earthquakes in two countries in the same year - both during intercontinental visits with the same people?
"It's cosmic," Principal Kevin Piacenza said.
To make matters stranger, Piacenza was briefing the Japanese on the likelihood of Hurricane Irene hitting Raleigh over the weekend and foiling their flight plans. Just as he started to warn them about power outages, the building wobbled.
Piacenza figured maybe the seventh-graders were bowling upstairs, or somebody was moving a refrigerator-size load. But Keiko Segawa, a teacher from Shinonome junior high who speaks little English, cried out, "Earthquake!"
With everyone safe and the building secure, teachers and parents were quick to point out the bizarre convergence of natural disasters. Piacenza's mind returned to flying over the empty beaches in Japan, and how the plane was so close to touching down that the landing gear had been lowered.
So many coincidences:
The Exploris kids' flight had been delayed in Dallas. The Japanese kids' flight had been delayed in Washington.
A tsunami followed the Japanese quake. A hurricane trails the American temblor.
Then I said, "Wow, that must've been an earthquake!"