Panic

I am running an experiment today and everything was running normally...

Until the room started shaking.  At first I thought it was a large truck outside rumbling past but then I realized that literally the entire room was shaking and it felt like the rumbling was coming from below the lab.

So I ran outside to investigate.

To find an entire lab of graduate students also tumbling out of the building worriedly looking back at our building, wondering when it was going to blow.  A lab next to ours also came outside and started calling to us, asking us what we had been doing in our building and what had gone wrong.  

You see, our lab used to have a nuclear reactor in it.  And now it houses a supersonic combustion wind tunnel.  (Yes, that means we're blowing things up at speeds faster than the speed of sound)

So we all had good cause to sprint when the building started shaking.

It turns out it was an earthquake, 5.8 earthquake 30 miles outside of Charlottesville.

<Sigh of relief>

"Oh Good!"  I exclaimed to the maintenance guy who told me the news.  He laughed.  But then stopped when he realized that my excitement was not due to love of earthquakes but because it was much better than the alternative.

We all go back inside.

Just another day in my lab...