Station House Restaurant proprietor Jarek Kotlewski, says on the evening of Oct. 27, at approximately 8 p.m., he was sitting at a table in the dining room completing some paper work, when something strange started to happen in his Barriere establishment.
“I thought, what is going on?” said Jarek, “Every ornament on the ceiling was moving, all of the fish decorations were swaying on their strings, and all in the same back and forth direction as if they were synchronized.”
Looking around the room to see what else was going on, Jarek says, “What amazed me most of all, was that when I looked at my fish tank, the water was completely still, no waves at the top either, but the plants in the water were also swaying back and forth. It was so amazing.”
As other staff members joined him, everyone wondered what was happening.
”We were just dumb-founded about what we were seeing,” said Jarek, “And then we noticed that the planters hanging from the ceiling in front were also moving.”
Some of the staff thought all of the moving objects might be a train, and Jarek wondered if a large generator in the basement was malfunctioning and causing the reaction; but neither of these happenings had ever caused a response like this in the building before.
“We might have been a little worried, and I said as a joke, this might be an earthquake,” tells Jarek.
All the strange movement stopped in about a minute, and everyone returned to what they had been doing prior to the disturbance. Then, approximately an hour later, Jarek received a telephone call from a friend to tell him that indeed, there had been a violent earthquake measuring 7.7 south of Haida Gwaii, which shook British Columbia’s north-central coast.
So far away, and yet strong enough to move the decorations and plants at the Station House in Barriere. A sobering thought for all, and a reminder to think about earthquake preparedness.
Of note is the fact the Oct. 27, earthquake south of Haida Gwaii was the second largest to hit the country since 1949, when another earthquake was recorded in the same area of the province with a magnitude of 8.1.