This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Community Corner

'It Felt Like a Wave'

At first, a number of residents attributed tremors to something other than an earthquake.

When shook the region Tuesday afternoon, many Essex-Middle River residents first thought the shaking and swaying they were feeling was caused by something else.

Toyin Otuyelu, who stays home with her son and daughter in Middle River, was sitting with her children on her bed. Otuyelu said at first, "It felt like a wave or something, and I thought my son was shaking the bed."

"My son was calm," the mother said. "My daughter was screaming and yelling."

Find out what's happening in Essex-Middle Riverwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Otuyelu said her first reaction was screaming and yelling as well, along with calling for her mother-in-law, who was downstairs. Not knowing what to do and also not wanting to drag her children along behind her, she told her son and daughter to get on her back to go downstairs.

"It was really scary, but it went by real quick," she said.

Find out what's happening in Essex-Middle Riverwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Otuyelu's husband, Ola, works for the state of Maryland in Baltimore and said he was mildly disturbed by his coworkers' initial lack of reaction to the tremors shaking their building. He, however, realized quickly what was happening.

Explaining that he "did not want this building falling on me," Ola Otuyelu said he saw the shaking stairs and took "two leaps to go down 20 steps."

"I was going to be out of this building," he said.

Otuyelu said, between the quake itself and the difficulty afterward in reaching loved ones, the earthquake "took a little from me."

His leaps down the stairs and the sore ankle that resulted prevented his evening run with his wife Tuesday at Eastern Regional Park.

Mary Thomas had a similar reaction to the quake, though not punctuated by any daring physical feats.

"I was like, 'I'm getting out of here,' and I picked up my cell phone and ran out," said the Middle River woman, who works for a property management company in the area.

She said everyone in her department left the building, which was evacuated for about a half hour before anyone was allowed back in.

"The computer was shaking. Everything was shaking," Thomas said. "I was like, 'What the heck is that?'"

Nonetheless, Thomas's daughter, who was at day care at the time, slept through the whole event.

Leslie Wise, of Middle River, a special educator at St. Elizabeth School in Baltimore, thought at first that the school's shaking was the result of work being done on the building's roof. Her own and the rest of the faculty's subsequent suspicions of an earthquake were confirmed on the Internet shortly after the quake ended.

With no students in the building, Wise said she and administrators still "walked around and checked on everybody to make sure everybody was OK."

"Everybody was just really surprised," said Wise, "because this is not an event we're used to in Baltimore."

Download the movie

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Essex-Middle River