[meteorite-list] Sonic Boom in Michigan?

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Dec 10 17:48:09 2004
Message-ID: <200412102248.OAA20414_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.mlive.com/news/sanews/index.ssf?/base/news-13/110269199991250.xml

Sonic boom? Perhaps
DEAN BOHN
THE SAGINAW NEWS (Michigan)
December 10, 2004

Some likened it to noiseless thunder.

Others said they heard a boom, while still others suspected an earthquake.

Whatever it was that shook Saginaw on Thursday afternoon left many
residents puzzled.

"I was on the phone with my uncle about 2 p.m. when I felt the house
kind of shake," said Beverly J. Nothelfer, 54, who lives along Irving in
Saginaw.

"It kind of felt like when thunder shakes the house, but I didn't hear
anything. It was like an explosion without the noise."

Employees at Princing & Ewend, a public relationbs and marketing firm
along Niagara next to the Holland Street Bridge in Saginaw, also were
left shaken.

"I heard a boom, but louder than normal," said Andrea L. Fisher, 28, of
Midland, president of the company.

"We're right next to the bridge and big trucks go over it all the time,
and the big ones can cause a kind of rattle here. But this was louder
than anything in the past. We heard it more than felt it.

"Our creative director, Greg Branch, came over from the other end of the
building and asked, 'Did you guys feel that?' "

"I felt a vibration," Branch said. "Occasionally you get that if a
double-trailer truck goes over the bridge and hits a bump. I even looked
out the window to see the truck, but there wasn't any.

"I knew it wasn't an earthquake because of the noise."

Some folks old enough to remember sonic booms are wondering if an errant
aircraft pushed across the sky too fast.

Branch said he's starting to believe that's what caused the excitement.

"It sounded a lot like it, but then I thought, 'Nah, we don't have
(sonic booms) anymore.' "

Sonic booms result when objects move faster than the speed of sound --
about 760 mph, depending on the altitude. Sonic booms were known to
break windows in homes and shake plaster loose. Congress outlawed them
over land in the 1970s.

Experts are ruling out a temblor.

"Michigan has not had an earthquake," Carolyn C. Bell, spokeswoman for
the U.S. Geological Survey headquarters in Reston, Va., said Thursday.

The agency's nearest seismograph, at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, is sensitive enough to detect tremors well into Canada, she said.
Received on Fri 10 Dec 2004 05:48:05 PM PST