Infrasound Resonance in Newport, Minnesota

Mystery surrounds shaking homes in Newport, MN

by Renee Tessman for Kare11.com
October 11, 2009

A Twin Cities community has a mystery on its hands. Homes in a neighborhood in Newport regularly shake and no one knows why. The homes on 1st Avenue North, just north of 20th Street, look like they're on stable ground. But those who live inside are shaken up.

Crystal Oswald says, "I've noticed it for a couple months now." She describes what happens. "You hear stuff shaking on your bed frames. You hear doors rattling in your kitchen, drawers shaking."

Oswald says she and six neighbors feel tremors in their homes at dinner time and then overnight at 1:30, 3:30, 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. for no more than 5 minutes, pretty much on a daily basis. She says, "I had to put stoppers on my (kitchen cupboard) doors just because of the wood on wood rattling."

What's strange is that other folks, just a block away, feel nothing. Theirs has never been a quiet neighborhood. Within blocks there is an industrial area, and also a busy freeway and very busy train tracks. Oswald says, "We hear trains go by but it's not anything like that." Some of these neighbors have lived here for decades. This rattling is accompanied by a different noise.

Oswald describes it as, "Kind of a like a bold, beating noise in the house." Neighbors suspected construction on the Wakota Bridge nearby. But MN DOT says no one works on it overnight. So could it be natural tremors?

Not according to Val Chandler, a geophysicist with the Minnesota Geological Survey. He says, "I kind of doubt that its' a natural earthquake."

He's heard of no recent seismic activity in the area. There are other natural ways tremors can surface. The homes are just blocks from the Mississippi River and Chandler says caves under river bluffs can collapse. But vibrations from that, or even a sinkhole, would be short-lived.

Chandler says, "I suspect it's just something mechanical doing it at some sort of large scale facility." He suggests perhaps a new industrial size furnace or trash compactor recently installed at a local business.

The Newport city administrator, Brian Anderson tells us Newport Public Works has checked with local businesses, but no one knows what could be causing these homes to shake. It will continue to investigate.

Still, that leaves Oswald with no solid answers. She says, "It's just unexplainable right now."

In Newport, Subterranean Vibration Blues

by Kevin Giles for the Star Tribune
October 10, 2009

On shaky ground in Newport: Jim Doppler, left, Lana Solem, Donna Wiersgalla, Crystal Oswald, Elsie Kramer and Bailey Conklin (holding Oswald's son, Landon) gathered on 1st Avenue on Wednesday. Some in the neighborhood have reported that their houses will shake or vibrate for no apparent reason. They've asked the city for help, but so far no one has been able to come up with an explanation.

Residents of one neighborhood - where 100 trains a day pass - report that their houses now shake randomly. No one knows what's causing it.

Cupboards and drawers in Crystal Oswald's house shake. Vibrations wake Donna Wiersgalla's 3-year-old daughter three or four times a night. A few doors down, Bailey Conklin, 13, removed rattling pictures from her bedroom wall.

That's life these days on 1st Avenue N. in Newport, where a phenomenon that nobody can explain troubles residents enough that they're seeking help from city officials and comparing notes in one another's kitchens.

At least eight households have reported intermittent and random shaking, and thus far public officials have been unable to find a cause.

"It wouldn't be so bad if someone could give me some answers," said Oswald, whose roommate has threatened to move out because of the shaking. "It's becoming a big pain, especially at night. It feels like there's a helicopter going over your house and I open the door and there's nothing."

The affected residents live next to a park in the northwest corner of Newport, a Washington County city of about 3,700 near the Mississippi River. Industries and highways surround the neighborhood, but it's unclear whether any of them -- including the nearby Wakota Bridge on Interstate 494 -- have anything to do with the mysterious vibrations that are beginning to feel like a slow form of torture to residents.

"I've never felt this before," said Wiersgalla, who has lived in the same house all of her 37 years. "I think we all thought it was kind of crazy, so we didn't say anything for a while."

100 Trains Not to Blame

Neighbors discount freight trains as the culprits, even though they rumble past the neighborhood more than 100 times a day, as they've done for years. They can't think of any industry that's new or different except the bridge, but the Minnesota Department of Transportation said that nobody works on the construction in the evenings or overnight.

Corb Hopkins, the neighborhood mail carrier and a City Council member, said he hasn't felt the vibrations down the street from where he lives, but doesn't doubt it exists.

"Down here in Newport we have very little topsoil and everything sits on limestone," he said. "We're all sitting on the same slab of rock. If there's vibration, it's going to carry."

But Val Chandler, a geophysicist with the Minnesota Geological Survey, said bedrock vibrations don't carry far. "The most likely culprit would be heavy machinery activity nearby," he said. "It's not very likely that it's a natural earthquake, or somebody would recognize it as such."

Dottie Conklin, Bailey's mother, has felt the vibrations for about a month. She has watched bottled water shake on her kitchen table while her neighbor has told her that his windows rattle.

Most of the houses along 1st Avenue N. were built in the 1960s or 1970s, and in many cases, residents have lived there long enough to recognize anything out of the ordinary -- until now.

"It's kind of befuddling," said Chandler, who is more inclined to think that the vibrations come from bedrock when caverns collapse deep below the surface or when a big new dam is dug. Just why residents of one block in Newport feel the vibrations and others don't deepens the mystery, he said.

A bulk fuel plant, a frozen-foods storage company and a garbage recycling firm that's been operating for 21 years surround the neighborhood, Hopkins said, but he doubts that they're doing anything new that would cause vibrations. Newport's public works department couldn't find the source of the problem either. Hopkins recognizes that the shaking annoys residents, but doesn't know what the city should do next.

Wiersgalla said that her husband wants to move. She said the vibrations are wearing down her family -- she logs the times when it rouses her daughter at night -- but she doesn't want to leave.

"As long as I don't wake up some morning and find my house bouncing in the Mississippi River, I'll be all right," she said.

Analysis

These resonant vibrations experienced in Newport, Minnesota are caused by the shifting Earth resonance in accordance with the increasing intensity of solar flare activity. Baffled Newport residents can be assured that these flare-ups of infrasound activity will continue to grow in duration and intensity, as witnessed throughout the world at hundreds of other sites which are becoming known as focal points of extremely low, inaudible acoustic humming.

Standing waves of infrasound resonance are focused onto the piezeoelectric limestone of the Newport bedrock by the Orion pyramids of Giza, Egypt, which are themselves also mainly comprised of resonant limestone, synthetically created in a fashion similar to modern concrete. Newport, Minnesota (44.87°N 93.00°W) is 6,200 miles from the Giza plateau - distance that is 24.90% of the Earth's mean circumference. The Newport area is very near the 1/4 circumference distance of 25%, which accurately expresses the sacred geometric conjunction of a square within a circle - the Sanskrit Mandala.

This same geopositioning relationship with the Great Pyramid is seen at several other energetic focal points where unusual events are stimulated by surges in the Earth's standing wave fields. Huge sandstone boulders have levitated into very tall trees at this 25% circumference distance in both Limon and Yellowwood State Parks in Indiana. Crop circles form at this 25% distance in Madisonville, Tennessee showing the same configuration of quartered circles impressed into the wheat field. High intensity infrasound standing waves focused on the area caused panic and dismay in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee on the same night that the Madisonville crop circle was found! Knoxville lies exactly 25.0% of the Earth's circumference from Giza as well.

News reports from Seattle, Washington have recorded this same low-frequency sound in a more pronounced audible beating event which had the whole Puget Sound area asking authorities for an explanation, where none could be found. Audio recordings of the powerful infrasound resonance have been produced by acoustic engineers at another energetic focal point on the planet, in Auckland, New Zealand. Earth booms and humming have also been reported in Llanidloes, Mawnan, Bridlington, Klai, Sydney, Ranchlands, and in the US in Anderson, Kimberley, Pelham, Richmond, Wilmington, Mobile, Knob Noster, Denver, Arroyo Grande and Atwater.