Earthquakes & hurricanes & fires -- OH MY!

It was quite a week in Ol' Virginny!

The 5.8 earthquake in Mineral (about 45 miles NW of Richmond) last Tuesday was crazy... I was sitting at my desk at work (downtown Richmond) when it happened. We've had a lot of construction going on around our office building lately, so at first I just assumed the rumbling was something related to that... that is, until the stuff on my desk started to dance around and my coworker Liz yelled to get out of the building. That evening, I was at rehearsal at Swift Creek Mill Theatre in Colonial Heights (south of Richmond) during the first major 4.2 aftershock. I completely slept through the other one around 1 a.m. There was another early morning aftershock (4.5) on Thursday, which I also slept through.

Hurricane Irene wasn't as brutal to Richmond as Isabel was in 2003, but Richmond suffered the highest percentage of power outages during Irene (371,000 people in Richmond, 973,000 total in Virginia). Robb and I were part of the small percentage of the city that didn't lose power. The lights flickered regularly and power would go off for 30 seconds at a time, but came back on again. We are so thankful that nothing major happened to us. My coworker Tony's neighborhood south of the river was hit hard. One home had its roof completely knocked off (see photo). Lots of downed trees and blocked roads. We had a dead branch come down in our front yard, but that's nothing compared to what some people are dealing with.

Robb's sister Jennifer and her family, as well as his mom and step dad, live in Gloucester County, near the coast. His mom and step dad evacuated, but his sister stayed. They are without power, but no major damage. Gloucester had a horrible tornado rip through the area last spring causing over $7 million in damage, so a lot of people were still trying to put their lives back together after that.

One positive thing is that all the rain has seemed to put a damper on the 6,000+ acre fire in the Great Dismal Swamp in SE Virginia that has been burning and growing for three weeks. Smoke is still visible but no flames have been spotted, and the fire doesn't seem to have spread. We could smell the smoke here in Richmond prior to Irene.

Seems like the only thing we need to check off the natural disaster list is a volcano! (And maybe some locusts...!?)

We're grateful for all the thoughts and prayers -- Robb and I feel extremely fortunate in all this!