The Earthquakes of Kefalonia

I feel the earth move under my feet.

(Queue not the song but the earthquakes of Kefalonia!)

It has been well over a month since I have sat down at my desk (or any desk, for that matter) for more than 15 minutes to complete any task that would require a significant amount of time—to prepare a lesson for my students, edit photos for the blog, write a post, browse on social media.

It has been well over a month since I have been sleeping in sportswear. With my socks on (and I have never ever slept with socks on in the past, even on the coldest winter nights) and my running shoes by the bed. If woken up in the middle of the night, I need to be able to put them on in seconds. See, on January 26th, I roamed rainy streets in soaking slippers for several hours, and I have since learnt my lesson!

And it has been well over a month since I’ve had a fully stocked emergency backpack within easy reach. And I refuse to empty or store it. And it has been well over a month that every morning when I strip down to take a shower, I cannot help but think “Ok, any other time I can probably handle, but not now—please NOT now!” Tee hee…

Earthquakes in antiquity

Then, last Wednesday, when I had finally decided it was high time, I sat down to write a blog post on my recent experiences, and boom! There he was again! He, as in Enceladus/Enkelados, the Giant, one of the sons of Gaia (Earth) & Uranus, buried by goddess Athena after a battle under Mount Etna on the island of Sicily, Italy. To quote Wikipedia: “The volcanic fires of Etna were said to be the breath of Enceladus, and its tremors to be caused by him rolling his injured side beneath the mountain. In Greece, an earthquake is still often called ‘a strike of Enceladus.’”

2014 Earthquakes

Kefalonia has had 3 major earthquakes in the past months:

• on Sunday, January 26th [15:55 local time, a 5.9 magnitude (on the Richter magnitude scale), 18 km deep].
• after almost exactly a week, on Monday, February 3rd [5:08 local time, a 5.8 magnitude, 2(!) km deep]
• finally, the latest one, on Wednesday, March 5th [14:49 local time, a 4.9 magnitude, 19 km deep]

My parents’ house, among many others, has suffered damage, but thankfully, none were severe. There are a million things we have to do, repair-wise, in the following months, so that is our next challenge.

Meanwhile, there have been more than 3.000 tremors in between major events. Scientists say that such aftershock sequences are typical post-seismic phenomena and expect them to go on for up to 8 months! Kefalonia is famous for its seismic activity since we are geographically sitting on an active fault of the northern Ionian Sea rift (part of the Calabria-Peloritani Arc).

Thinking about it, Ι do have quite a few childhood memories of sleeping-in-the-car nights (1983, 1988, 1992) while my dad was only 18 years old when another major earthquake swept the island in 1953. The neighboring Ithaca and Zante suffered major damages too. Also, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake completely destroyed part of the island (the town of Lixouri) in February 1867. Yeah, I know, my birthplace rocks—pun fully intended!

Here’s a British Pathé News Special I discovered on YouTube about the 1953 “strike of Enceladus”: