Earthquake

What's going on?

I woke up and couldn't work out what was going on - it sounded like someone was rattling the windows, and it felt like someone was trying to drive a bus through the downstairs of the house. I opened my eyes, the alarm clock read 00:58. I couldn't get my head round what was happening.

It's all coming back to me.

Then I remembered - back in 1996 when I was living in Italy - it was Christmas Eve, and it had been unseasonably hot, immediately after some particularly cold weather. I was laid in bed, just like last night, and was disturbed to be woken up by what I thought were some very thoughtless lorry drivers whose vehicles were so loud that they rattled the windows.
-- Huh, Italian drivers, I thought! The next morning, when Daniela (my cousin) came to pick me up, she said (in Italian)
-- So, did you feel the......? (and she said a word I didn't understand)
-- The what? I said
-- Terramoto, she replied. I did a quick breakdown of the word in my head...Terra = earth, ground, land. Moto = movement, motion....OH I thought, it means EARTHQUAKE! I thought back to my being woken by the 'loud lorries' and realised that what I had actually felt was an earthquake!! Wow, my 1st one and all I had done was rolled over cursing the lorry drivers!!
So when I woke, at just before 1am this morning, I knew EXACTLY what was going on.

Disbelief

I heard Dan turn over.
-- Did you feel that? I said.
-- Yeah, I felt like someone was shaking the bed, he replied.
-- It was an earthquake.
-- Don't be silly.

T'interweb

I reached down for the laptop and logged on. Nothing on the news. Nothing, in fact on the whole of Google. At 01:09 I was just researching earthquakes on Wikipedia and I came across a link to a list of earthquakes in the UK - BINGO! The last entry didn't have an awful lot of data in it; no epicentre, no force, but it referenced an Earthquake on the 27th Feb, and, when I looked on the Wikipedia "history" page, you could see it had been updated in the last 10 minites. In fact, the 1st revision to the data had happened at 01:02. Someone was quick on the draw!
Refreshing the page over the next 20 minutes or so saw many additions to the "where it was felt" section which ranged from sensible entries (Lincolnshire, Manchester etc) to the ridiculous ("Dan's face", "my pants") and almost every number between 1 and 300 on the alleged "Richter Scale". I think articles always go through this upheaval before they settle down to a more stable version
Finally, one of the posters cited a reference to the US Geological Survey website with full details on the quake. (Interestingly the British Geological Survey website was down!)
Although I kept searching the news websites every so often, it wasn't until 01:35 that the BBC reported it as breaking news. Only 33 minutes behind Wikipedia!

Dodgy BBC reporting
Rather misleadingly, on the BBC website at the moment ( 02:18) the Breaking News symbol has 3 articles next to it. The 1st one is the one linked to above and is entitled 'Earth Tremor felt accross England' and below it are 2 articles (in smaller font) - one of which is 'Hundreds of homes damaged' and the other 'How earthquakes happen'. I saw the 2nd article and clicked on it thinking that people's homes had been damaged by the quake - only to realise it was an article on the 2007 earthquake felt in Birmingam. Don't you think that seems a bit misleading?