I was sitting in the video control room of the Winchester Auditorium at Milton High School speaking with Mike Lynch of MATV at about ten after seven last night when everything took a bit of a skip. I looked at Mike. “What was that?” Evidently, it was an earthquake.
Milton High School is a large fortress of a building. What the folks in the auditorium felt was a extremely brief hiccup. If you were somewhere else in Milton you likely felt the effects of this 4.0 earthquake whose epicenter was in southern Maine more acutely.
You can find coverage from Boston.com here.
On the occasion of last night’s earthquake, I can advise people that our school buildings are now much safer in the event of an earthquake after the renovation projects of the last decade. One of the things that we had to do in the old buildings was add seismic clips and other measures to minimize the potential effects to building structure in the event of an earthquake. For example, one hidden condition that we found during the course of construction in the old high school (now Pierce Middle School) auditorium was that the 25 plus feet masonry walls at the side of the auditorium were completely unsupported, not even tied to the masonry walls behind them. In fact, when a worker set a ladder against the top of one of the walls, it cracked and pushed the block back toward the cavity behind it. During the course of our project, this situation was repaired and the two walls tied together and clips installed at the top to further stabilize it.