When the 5.9 magnitude earthquake struck today in Virginia, I shot off an email to my ex who is living there now. It was kind of scary waiting for the reply, asking myself if I should call, and being a bit apprehensive about doing so. But it didn’t take long before I got his reply back and I felt better.

I emailed him back asking him if it was scary, and he said, “It was wild. First it felt like a train was going by, then a herd of buffalo, then it really increased and everything started shaking from side to side for about 30 seconds, and then it trailed off. We evacuated the building and everyone went home.”

I decided to check online to see if I could find out if there was much damage. Since it only had happened a couple of hours before, there really wasn’t much about it yet online, just a few articles. Most of the articles on earthquakes I was seeing were about the Haitian earthquake and the recent earthquake in Japan. It was a relief that I was not seeing any major disruption due to infrastructure collapses.

Then I started reading articles that had been posted about how two of the nuclear power plants in Virginia were shut down due to the quake. This got me thinking about how scary these old nuclear power plants are.  This country has not been diligent about maintaining its nuclear power plants, with many being 30 years old and not in the condition that they should be. Also, many were built close to extremely populous areas, which could spell disaster if they were hit by earthquakes or even aftershocks.

Search and rescue robots are making great leaps and bounds in their capabilities to get jobs done where people should not be, such as disasters at nuclear power plants. But we as a country need to take a good look at the danger that we are putting our citizens in by continuing to have these old, ill-maintained nuclear power plants in our midst. Too scary for me!