Post-Tornado Rainbow

Yesterday I thought it was just a typical windy Autumn morning while I was sitting in the Middletown Starbucks. What I didn't know was that most of Kentucky was on a tornado watch, that a tornado had been spotted just over the river in Indiana, and another one had overturned a semi-truck on the Watterson.

Meanwhile, in Scott County, a forming funnel cloud was caught on video, and in Hopkinsville, one tore the roof off a storage building. That may or may not be the same one witnessed by National Weather Service spotters near Pembroke, and then in Dunmor in Muhlenberg County. An enormous tree in Berea toppled in the storm, narrowly missing an entire apartment complex. In Middlesboro, the mall was damaged and the power was knocked out.

To my surprise, one of the baristas came to the center of the room and announced, "uh, everybody, your attention please, we've just been informed that funnel clouds have been seen in Anchorage, so I'm going to have to ask you all to move away from the glass windows and to the rear of the building, for your safety."

And so we all migrated to the back, everyone suddenly intently tapping at their laptops and handhelds, and within seconds, we were all sharing info with each other that we'd gleaned. One guy instantly had a real-time animation from the NWS on his laptop full-screen, and was showing us how it was estimated to be moving at 80MPH and thus would be past us very quickly. It wasn't that long ago that we'd all be huddled around a radio, listening for the latest wire-service news update from the DJ, but now, every citizen with wi-fi internet access is instantly better informed than even that radio DJ of yesteryear.

Though the tornadic front did indeed swiftly pass, the rainstorm on its coattails continued for hours more. But when it was over and blue sky began to peek out from the cloud cover, I caught an odd rainbow that only existed over a portion of very specific clouds - when those clouds shifted, so did the rainbow, and when that cloud system rolled away, the rainbow was gone. Though my eye saw an evenly ordered full spectrum in it, my camera surprisingly did not - at least, not as clearly.

Kentucky Earthquakes

You may have heard about the New Madrid Fault Line, which runs underneath this very region we occupy, my fellow Kentuckians.

Although not much of major seismic importance has occurred in our lifetime, we still must take note that in 1812, the New Madrid quake was an estimated 8.0 or greater. Described as "the most intense intraplate earthquake series to have occurred in the contiguous United States", it was powerful enough to make church bells ring in Boston.

A University of Kentucky website calls the Western Kentucky area "the most seismically active region in the United States east of the Rockies". And if that wasn't bad enough, to the East, we're bounded by the Southern Appalachian Seismic Zone, which is also extremely active and produces tremors that affects Kentucky greatly. We're surrounded.

July 27, 1980: Sharpsburg, in Bath County, was struck by an earthquake that measured 5.1 on the Richter scale. This quake put a huge deep crack across the back concrete patio of the my parents' home in Richmond.

June 6, 2003: an earthquake struck Bardwell, measuring 4.5 on the Richter Scale. Considerable damage was caused.

June 19, 2005: Blandville was hit by an earthquake of 2.7 magnitude. Blandville had also already been affected by the Bardwell quake two years prior.

September 2005: Sharpsburg was hit again with a 2.5 quake, 25 years after the 1980 incident.

January 02, 2006: an earthquake measuring 3.6 was recorded in Equality, Illinois (very close to the Kentucky-Illinois border). Shaking was felt in many neighboring Kentucky counties.

April 2008: The Kentucky-Indiana border at Evansville was hit by a 5.4 earthquake. The quake was powerful enough to shake skyscrapers in Chicago, 240 miles north of the epicenter, and in Indianapolis, about 160 miles northeast of the epicenter.

May 8, 2009: an earthquake measuring 2.3 was felt in Kentucky, at 36.92N 83.67W, approximately 20 miles North of Middlesboro and 35 miles Southwest of Hazard.

May 10, 2009: a 1.1 earthquake hit near Jellico, TN along the Kentucky border.

Despite its strongest shocks having taken place a century ago, some say the New Madrid Fault is just getting warmed up because it's such a very young geological feature. Wikipedia says:

Because uplift rates associated with large New Madrid earthquakes could not have occurred continuously over geological timescales without dramatically altering the local topography, studies have concluded that the seismic activity there cannot have gone on for longer than 64,000 years...