Note before: This is an old “Diary Entry” from the Modem-Help site, re-jigged into the etmg format. The original site is now long gone.

I guess that it wouldn't even get a mention in San Francisco, but at about 4:30 pm GMT some monitors rocked at my place of work. Far more dramatic was the noise, as if a heavy vehicle had hit the building. I work inside a 2-storey atrium, metal-clad on the inside (it's a warehouse-type building rather than your normal office structure) & the whole thing echoed resonantly for a second — a bit like being on the inside of a tin-can. Upwards of a hundred people work there at any one time. A number of people jumped to their feet, and some raced outside (echoes of Sept 11, I think, though you could feel the power involved that made the building ring).

I work a twilight shift. Other people on earlier shifts reported 2 other, lesser — but similar — events earlier in the day. Another colleague, during a fag break (that's a cigarette break, Americans, and not what you think), said that he had heard reports the previous evening on the local Nottingham radio from folks in the Mansfield area who had seen floating lights in the sky. We also got reports during the day of people as far away as Leicester who had also felt the “bump”.

My place of work is about a mile from the Nottingham town centre. No damage at home, though some black-bits came out of the hot tap in the bathroom. I don't want to contemplate what still lines the inside of these pipes.

(added 29 Oct — the local paper reported it as 4.6 on the Richter scale with an epicentre some 20 miles to the NE of Nottingham.

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Alex Kemp