Pleasant Prairie - EaRtHqUaKe?!
Jun. 8th, 2024 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerToday we're in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. We arrived late last night. This morning we slept in a bit then around 10 drove over to visit with my sister at her house a few miles away.
It was just me, Hawk and my sister B. for a while at the house. B.'s daughter was going to a friend's party in a town park, and her husband was dropping her off.
B. gave us a quick tour of their home. They've lived there for several years, though it's our first time visiting.
It's an old home, over 100 years old. It was one of the first two houses in town, she explained. The one next door was originally the general store, and this house was built by the station master for the train station when the railroad came through. The home is small but has been added onto a few times over its history. That much is obvious from the front room, where the floor is sunken because there's no foundation beneath it— "They enclosed the front porch," I suggested— plus the whole second floor seems added on as the stairway is steep and crooked. Oh, and speaking of crooked, there pretty much isn't a plumb line anywhere in the house. Every window frame is crooked. Many of the doors don't close. Some of the walls are visibly leaning. None of the floors are level. And I don't just mean slightly off level; you can see where the floors dip and rise by inches across the width of a room!
While hanging out at the house we felt a sudden shake in the floor accompanied by a loud "THUNK!" sound.
"Whoa, was that an earthquake?" I asked. "In Wisconsin??"
"I think something exploded!" my sister responded. "We need to leave the house!"
"No, it's not an explosion," I assured her. "With an explosion there'd be more sounds and smoke and fire." (Yes, I know, I'm so reassuring. 🤣)
"I felt the floor under me drop one or two inches," Hawk noted.
The three of us agreed whatever it was, it came from underneath the house. "My guess is a support beam cracked," I suggested. We agreed to go down to the basement to check.
"I'm still scared of an explosion," B. said as we peered into the darkness down the steep stairs that looked like a set from the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz.
"If something exploded down there, we'd see light from the fire and smoke coming out," I helpfully reassured her again.
Downstairs I found something similar to what I had guessed 30 seconds earlier. A metal support jack that was supporting a floor joist had rusted out and fallen over. The loss of the support created the sudden drop in the floor we felt. The "THUNK!" sound was a combination of the wood beams settling and the 6' tall steel jack hitting the concrete floor.
B. is fortunate that she and her family are renting— so it's not their problem to fix, it's the landlord's. Furthermore, they're lucky the landlord lives next door— and is an engineer. She called him on her cell phone. He came over a minute later, walking through the hedge in the back yard. And once he saw the busted support jack he was like, "Yeah, I've got a spare." I figured his house needs them, too. He probably bought a three-pack last time he needed one. 😅
It was just me, Hawk and my sister B. for a while at the house. B.'s daughter was going to a friend's party in a town park, and her husband was dropping her off.
B. gave us a quick tour of their home. They've lived there for several years, though it's our first time visiting.
It's an old home, over 100 years old. It was one of the first two houses in town, she explained. The one next door was originally the general store, and this house was built by the station master for the train station when the railroad came through. The home is small but has been added onto a few times over its history. That much is obvious from the front room, where the floor is sunken because there's no foundation beneath it— "They enclosed the front porch," I suggested— plus the whole second floor seems added on as the stairway is steep and crooked. Oh, and speaking of crooked, there pretty much isn't a plumb line anywhere in the house. Every window frame is crooked. Many of the doors don't close. Some of the walls are visibly leaning. None of the floors are level. And I don't just mean slightly off level; you can see where the floors dip and rise by inches across the width of a room!
While hanging out at the house we felt a sudden shake in the floor accompanied by a loud "THUNK!" sound.
"Whoa, was that an earthquake?" I asked. "In Wisconsin??"
"I think something exploded!" my sister responded. "We need to leave the house!"
"No, it's not an explosion," I assured her. "With an explosion there'd be more sounds and smoke and fire." (Yes, I know, I'm so reassuring. 🤣)
"I felt the floor under me drop one or two inches," Hawk noted.
The three of us agreed whatever it was, it came from underneath the house. "My guess is a support beam cracked," I suggested. We agreed to go down to the basement to check.
"I'm still scared of an explosion," B. said as we peered into the darkness down the steep stairs that looked like a set from the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz.
"If something exploded down there, we'd see light from the fire and smoke coming out," I helpfully reassured her again.
Downstairs I found something similar to what I had guessed 30 seconds earlier. A metal support jack that was supporting a floor joist had rusted out and fallen over. The loss of the support created the sudden drop in the floor we felt. The "THUNK!" sound was a combination of the wood beams settling and the 6' tall steel jack hitting the concrete floor.
B. is fortunate that she and her family are renting— so it's not their problem to fix, it's the landlord's. Furthermore, they're lucky the landlord lives next door— and is an engineer. She called him on her cell phone. He came over a minute later, walking through the hedge in the back yard. And once he saw the busted support jack he was like, "Yeah, I've got a spare." I figured his house needs them, too. He probably bought a three-pack last time he needed one. 😅
