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Mild Earthquake Hits Toronto – Twitter and Wikipedia First to Report
Wikipedia records the event, before the mainstream or electronic media.
Quake hit at 13:45 EST
Twitter feeds start reporting 13:50
Wikipedia entry for Ottawa edited to show quake 13:51
Globe and Mail reports quake 13:56
Actually, I received my first Tweet about the earthquake today at 1.44 p.m..
I was in an office tower in Ottawa, closer to the epicentre. The windows rattled and then the floor under us started moving. It lasted about 30 seconds. Most people started evacuating the building before internal alarms went off to get people out. Cell phone, SMS, G3 and Edge communication were all immediately tied up. I was able to get onto Twitter, send out a message and get updates faster than getting out a text message to a family member. We got the all clear to go back into the building about 20 minutes later.
I’m sure for someone used to earthquakes it would have seemed like nothing, but for those of us not used to it, it was quite disconcerting. I have felt tremors in Toronto before, but this was a lot stronger.
The earthquake killed my fish! it broke my fish stand and all my fish came crashing down! heres the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB5NCzDy7hE
Shaken, then, and perhaps (in Ottawa anyway) somewhat stirred.
Leave it that there were some double entendres among my male colleagues after the shaking stopped.
Best summarized in this comic:
http://xkcd.com/723/