I was in Baker Center when the floor started shaking and felt more bemused than startled afterward. How peculiar! Baker doesn’t do much shaking generally, so I assumed a piece of construction equipment or a large truck must have hit the building. This was not completely out of left field, as I heard the beeping sound of a truck backing up a few seconds later. People were wondering what had happened, and I offered my guess without too much conviction. Then, I looked out the window to see if I could see anything. Nope, nothing. So, I shrugged.
Then someone said it was an earthquake, and I started thinking all over again. In Athens? I figured it must have been a massive earthquake or explosion thousands of miles away, and we just happened to feel it here. Perhaps Yellowstone had finally exploded? I read over the summer that it is right above a hot spot of geological activity and explodes catastrophically every once in a very long while, which was why this came to mind. But the sky was not black as soot, so it was clearly not that, either.
Finally, I came across someone with a smartphone, and learned that the quake originated in Nelsonville, of all places! Perhaps God was damning the bypass, for what it hath wrought upon that poor town? Perhaps, but this was far preferable to receiving the aftershocks of another place’s ruin. I was glad I would not have to anticipate days of horrible stories in the news about survivors and flooding, but I was also puzzled. Divine acts aside, what could be the cause? My third guess for the brief shaking of Athens was… fracking.
This was not a completely random thought either. Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, a technique for accessing natural gas that produces a lot of polluted water. If you have not heard, Youngstown, Ohio, experienced a number of minor earthquakes last year. Soon after, a March 9, 2012 article in The Post reported that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources linked some of this seismic activity to an injection well used to dispose of wastewater from the fracking process. However, The Post noted on Nov. 21 that the origins of last Wednesday’s quake were too deep in the earth for this to be a good explanation.
Zero for three in my causal guessing game, I learned that even the environment in Athens, familiar and predictable though it generally is, can surprise us. And, in a funny way, this was refreshing.
For all our understanding, we are not always effective at anticipating the future. The world is more complex than our models of it, and we are not totally in charge. In a world in which there are so many variables, it is highly probable that something improbable will happen somewhere. And sometimes, that place is where we are.
So, if things seem boring and predictable, we just need to wait a while. You can be sure that something unusual will happen soon enough.
Zach Wilson is a senior studying philosophy and a columnist for The Post. What did you think about after the earthquake? Email him at cw299210@ohiou.edu.
