Online And All Shook Up

pfranz@lnpnews.com

Steve Johnson had just gotten home and was checking his e-mailwhen he felt the rumbling.

"I immediately recognized it for what it was," said Johnson, wholives in Lancaster city.

He quickly logged onto Lancaster Newspaspers' LancasterOnline.com"TalkBack" forums, wondering if anyone else had felt the tremorsthat shook the county at 12:04 a.m. Saturday. Plenty of otherparticipants on TalkBack and other Internet discussion boards did;and long before news reports identified the rumbling as a 3.4-magnitute earthquake, local online communities had already figuredout what had happened.

Buzz on local Internet forums began minutes after the shocksabated. At 12:10 a.m., a poster on Lancasterfire.com - a site usedby local firefighters and other emergency responders - wrote that hewasn't sure how many others felt the shock, but it was "veryprofound" in West Lampeter Township.

Within minutes, others were chiming in, sharing stories. "Ithought a car was coming into my house," wrote one poster. "It tookme a couple minutes to figure out what it was."

Many people seem to have jumped online soon after the shakingstopped in an attempt to figure out what was going on.

"I got online right away," Jeannie Kontis, of Manheim Township,said. A TalkBack user posted a seismograph readout from MillersvilleUniversity's Campus Weather Service at 12:12 a.m. - confirming forKontis what had happened.

Said city resident Paula Luciano: "We have 24-hour news cycles inthis country and it took ordinary citizens to go online and leteveryone know what was going on."

She was watching TV in the first-floor living room of her cityhouse when the earthquake hit. "Our house really rocked," she said."My husband thought something exploded."

A report by the Intelligencer Journal was posted onLancasterOnline at 12:46 a.m. Landisville resident Tom Knier said hefound out it was indeed an earthquake after seeing a screen crawl onWGAL-TV at around 1:45 a.m.

The first official report from the U.S. Geological Survey wasposted online about five hours after the tremors were felt.

"I had been through earthquakes in the 1980s," Luciano said, "butit was never this strong."