I walked into the office today and set my stuff down after flying to DC from Orlando this morning. The office was right next to the stairs. All of the sudden I heard a thumping sound that was recurring. My first thought was that someone who was rather large was running down the stairs. Then I thought 'no, that doesn't sound right maybe it's someone taking a refrigerator up the stairs or maybe a refrigerator had come off a dolly and it was falling down the stairs'?
By this time, about 2 seconds later, the windows were shaking and the ceiling panels were rattling. We all looked around at each other and said "what is that"? I looked out the window and saw the glass windows on the buildings across the street were shaking too. I then instantly realized it was an earthquake.
When I came to this realization my next thought was 'oh crap, that doesn't happen in this part of the country, this could be really severe since they are so rare, I'm on the second story and this place isn't built for it on the east coast which means I don't want to be in some sort of collapse; not only that I want to be out the big glass front door before it shatters'.
In that instant, I turned and BOLTED and I do mean BOLTED out of the office door, through the internal lobby, out of the front office door, and down two flights of stairs, through the small external lobby, and out the big glass doors. Of two flights of stairs I think I only touched 3 actual stairs on the way down, and I was on the lawn in about 6 or 7 seconds total. It was an adrenaline shot and an instinctual reaction. I didn't even grab my cell phone or sunglasses, nor my backpack or laptop. I kind of kicked myself because of that afterwards because the importance of those items.
But at least I had the awareness to get out quickly. One guy in the office said "we weren't sure what was happening but when we saw Collins nearly hit Mach 1 on the way out the door we knew it was serious"
The whole event where I was at lasted about 10-15 seconds I would estimate. The sound and feeling of the building shaking was an experience I'll NEVER forget.
There are several videos floating around the web of the earthquake in action. If I had been on the west coast I probably wouldn't have been quite as spooked since it's a somewhat normal occurrence over there. But I guess the biggest part was the sheer surprise that earthquakes were even possible in the DC area.
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