MUCH ADO ABOUT N.M. TREMOR

An earthquake registering 2.4 on the Richter scale hit Socorro, south of Albuquerque, on Friday night.  There wasn't any damage and most residents didn't even feel it, but the local media seems intent to make a big deal out of the tremor.  There have been multiple reports on the quake each of the last three nights on the evening news.

Earthquakes are actually fairly common in this part of New Mexico.  A major fault runs south from Albuquerque along the Rio Grande.  In fact, volcanic and seismic activity along this rift was responsible for forming the Sandia and Manzano mountains east of the valley.  I've felt tremors here on several occasions — they've never been strong enough even to move items in my medicine cabinets (my mom used to tell us stories about living in California when sometimes the only indication an earthquake had occurred was when they would hear my grandfather yelling when everything fell out of the medicine cabinet into the sink when opened the next morning).

It seems like there would be more important things going on in the world than to report on a minor moving of the earth that few people felt.  I can imagine how the news would have played it up had a brick fallen off of a building somewhere as a result!