District Daily Natural Disaster

So it was a pretty busy week in DC. You might have seen something about that on the news. As Irene began rolling towards the city, workers scrambled to patch cracks left in the Washington Monument by Tuesday's earthquake. One of these cracks was four feet long and over four inches wide, making the sky above visible from inside the monument. They managed to temporarily patch the cracks, but many of them are still visible. If you click to view the larger version of this photo, you can see cracks shooting off from the corners of the observation window on the right. A larger crack, where the stones are visibly misaligned, can be seen in the center stone, three stones up from the circular lights. The monument is closed indefinitely. The hurricane, luckily, caused minimal damage to the city--much less than expected. But, as you can see, the rain finally cleared away.