Bitches Don't Know 'Bout My Quakes!

Yesterday's earthquake has been getting more press than the recent anniversary of Diana's bloody death. Lots of talk about this being the biggest seismic event in sixty or a hundred or five hundred years -- depending how you measure these things. Much less is being printed on how this isn't the only quake in recent memory, not by a long shot. I had my first earthquake experience in Farmville Virginia, 2003 -- which felt a hell of alot nastier than yesterday's little trembler. I slept through last year's 3 a.m. quake, as did many other DC residents. Quakes happen a whole lot more than most people realize -- tens of thousands a year -- but the eastern US is a strange place for them to be felt so often. Allow me to propose a cause --

Fracking.

Or "hydraulic fracturing." The natural gas industry's fancy way of saying "bombing the shit out of the rock shelf to reach that sweet sweet methane." As this country scrambles for a petrol alternative, natural gas horror stories become more and more common (my personal favorite is how mining the stuff can turn the local tap water flammable) and you'd think that, again, explosions going off underground might cause an upsurge in earthquakes.

Well it has.

Now correlation does not imply causation, but this is like if I came home to find a coffee filter on my cat's head and the garbage spread all over the apartment. Sure, a burglar owl could've come in and done that -- and locked the door on its way out -- but just as likely it is exactly what it looks like.

But there's no fracking in Virginia you say? Not yet -- and one would hope this spurs those idiot hicks in Richmond to revisit the policy. But fracking goes on with abandon just up in Pennsylvania and the scary truth is we don't fully understand plate tectonics. There are theories and there are lovable geeks watching seismometers all day, but your local weatherman still makes more reliable predictions than anyone claiming to know when an earthquake will happen.

It's like that old saw in chaos theory -- a butterfly halfway around the world flaps its wings and causes Rick Perry to go down on a dude. Pennsylvania ain't half the globe away from Virginia and exploding the earth is way more than a butterfly. Put two and two together and you have the natural gas industry putting cracks in the Washington Monument. That's not very American of them.

Granted this is all speculation, but it's less "How many angels on the head of a pin?" speculation and more "What happens if I put a gun to my head and pull the trigger?"