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156 stories in stone MoodusTremors and Sonic Booms In the early morning of June 17,1981,while enjoying a bowl of cornflakes,I heard a low rumbling sound. Shortly thereafter, the windows and sliding doors of our house in Haddam rattled strongly. Our three dogs panicked and joined me en masse on the couch.We had experienced a small earthquake, a Moodus tremor.After wiping spilled milk, cornflakes, and dogs from the couch, I walked (fast) down our path to the Haddam Meadows, anxious to see whether there was any unusual activity at theYankee Power Plant across the river.All was quiet on the nuclear front! That afternoon two similar events occurred. One appeared to last a little longer and turned out to have been two tremors in rapid succession.A seismic instrument buried in our backyard recorded the vibrations and sent its signals to Weston Observatory in Boston for analysis. It turned out that the tremors belonged to a pulsating swarm of more than one hundred seismic events spread over a period of two months.The sensitive seismic network picked up most of the tremors.The strongest shock was felt throughout the Haddam–Moodus area and had a magnitude estimated at 2.9. After that event I became more attuned to possible Moodus tremors and “discovered ” many very faint ones that rattled the sliding doors around the same time, between eight and nine in the morning. Weston Observatory was silent and the dogs slumbered on. Finally I found out that the Concorde leaving Kennedy airport would break through the sound barrier somewhere high above Long Island and cause a shock wave that at times made it all the way to the surface. I should have paid more attention to the dogs! Seismologists in the Netherlands have told me that their instruments have registered tremors with magnitudes up to 1.3 caused by crowds dancing during rock concerts.That’s one way to experience a typical Moodus “quake”! ...

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