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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

This was the strongest earthquake I felt since I moved to Bay Area ten years ago. Luckily, it was quite short. Woke me and all my friends in the SF and vicinity up though.

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I've lived in California all my life and was in San Mateo during Loma Prieta. How close you are to the epicenter has a strong effect on what you experience (it's undoubtedly more complicated than that but distance is a big factor). Last night's was 14.8 miles away from me and although I woke up, I didn't hear earthquaky sounds and shaking was moderate. Thought my partner had just flopped over in bed harder than usual. By contrast, a few years ago we had a 3.1 centered about 1.5 miles away that really made me fear it was a big one. The house jumped and stuff swayed, and I was just thinking I'd better get next to the bookcase when it stopped.

Same. Been 12 years in SF and this was the strongest. We were awake as well so we felt the whole thing. I think I saw the walls move.

Luckily it was short.

Contrast that with my experience in Ireland - 10 years and I heard thunder only twice, and saw a lightning strike only once. We sometimes get alerts due to some tropical storm that made its way up here, and the most we need to do is to collect our garbage bins and avoid biking because of the gusts.

This can't be true. We have thunder and lightning on a regular enough basis. The lightning is rarely of the fork variety though. And although the 'named' storms usually pass without much damage, it's not uncommon for people to be killed by falling trees etc. and large numbers of people to lose power. We're very lucky when it comes to lack of dangerous natural phenomena or animals but thunder is incredibly common.

I live in Dublin. People say the weather is much milder here. I would expect the other coasts to be much, much worse.

I’d say the same about East Anglia in UK, but in early ‘90s there was a tremor strong enough to notice. It was particularly strange then because you had to wait for the news on TV or radio to mention it.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2000/sep/25/uknews

That's actually surprising to me. Being in the North Atlantic, I would have thought thunder storms would be common. I lived in LA for 5 years, and I definitely missed thunder and lightning. If I were going to space, I'd bring rain/thunder/lightning sounds to listen to like we've seen in sci-fi films even more so than the ones with cricket sound tracks.

I live in Dublin, which is shielded from the worst storms. Still, the weather patterns are not conducing to thunderstorms and lightning strikes average to around 10 per day over the whole island.

There's no thunder in Ireland? Why?

Obviously thunder is caused by snakes, and St Patrick removed those.

(Coming from the Midwest where thunderstorms are so common as to just be assumed every rainstorm is one, it must be weird …)

There is. "In 2024, Ireland recorded almost 3,400 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes (lightning strikes), marking a moderately stormy year, but well below the exceptional year of 2023, which set a record with more than 9,000 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes detected."[1]

[1] https://www.meteorage.com/thunderstorm-report/ireland-lightn...

That's 10 per day for the whole of Ireland. Ireland isn't small enough people would see them that regularly.

There is thunder in Ireland, it’s just rarer than in much of the US. I’d imagine it’s due to the prevailing weather patterns.

I'm from Georgia where summer thunderstorms are extremely common and we had ones that were so explosive that candles would vibrate off the fireplace mantle. I moved to SoCal and i'm always amused when a small storm comes by once a year and people freak out.

I miss those storms man. Nothing like sitting on the porch and watching them roll through

As we called it in Missouri: good sleeping weather.

I can nap through a tornado, j tell you.

Same here hoss. Rain on a tin roof is unmatched.

That would put me into a coma.

Now hear this: we have almost no mosquitoes. Sometimes I joke I killed one and drove them back into extinction.

I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil. The thunderstorms there are GLORIOUS!

Second strongest I remember in my 16 years here, with the 2014 Napa Quake being notably more shaking.

I was in SF on a trip at the time and I got woken only by a few friends texting me to check that I was OK.

I usually don’t wake up to these but this one jolted me awake. I wish I had slept through this one though.

I was 3 miles from the epicenter. By far the strongest I’ve felt since I moved here 15 years ago. Hard to imagine what a 6+ would be like on the Hayward fault.

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