Small earthquake shakes the South
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- A light, rare earthquake measuring magnitude 4.9 shook the South in the early morning hours, waking up people from Mississippi to North Carolina,
but the tremor failed to inflict significant damage, bleary-eyed residents and officials told CNN.
The epicenter of the tremor was about 37 miles southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee, along the border of Georgia and Alabama, according to the United States Geological Survey Web site. It struck just before 5 a.m. EDT. The tremor was also felt in southeastern Kentucky, northeastern Mississippi, and the western parts of North and South Carolina, according to the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.
"We would expect items knocked from the shelves, pictures knocked off the walls, people waking up. We wouldn't expect any casualties," said John Bellini, a U.S.G.S. geophysicist in Golden.
"In California, you get something like this once every month. In the East, it's relatively uncommon, but not unheard of," he said.
Bellini also said there was a magnitude 3.9 earthquake about 50 miles to the north of this one in December, 2001, that was felt in Alabama, Tennessee and Florida.
"This one today was a little larger, felt over quite a wide area," he said.
Beverly Daniel, the acting director of Cherokee County's Emergency Management Agency in Alabama, said there are power outages reported and a few trees down.
"It felt like an explosion. We've got aftershocks," she said.
But no injuries had been reported.
Power outages are being reported around Sand Rock, Alabama, and Lookout Mountain, which spans Alabama and Tennessee, according to police.
"A few trailers shook out their foundations. .. but there are no reports of major damage or injuries," said Sabrina Harris, director of Dekalb County, Alabama's 911 department.
Police in the Atlanta area say they got several calls from residents in the metro region frightened and concerned by shaking and rumbles.
"My body is shaking because it was so frightening," said Susan Martin, a resident of Marietta, an Atlanta suburb. "The shaking of my bed and the shaking of my house woke me out of a dead sleep."
Martin, who lives in what she describes as a sturdy brick house, said she felt two series of rumbles.
"First I thought it was thunder. My house was shaking for 10 or 15 seconds. I was quick to get up and see if it was a tornado. .. I went to the window, but heard no wind and no rain. .. I called 911 and they asked me, are you calling about the earthquake."
"We've had hundreds of calls of people saying the tremors knocked pictures off walls, and a couple said their windows were cracked," said Herbert Dodd, head of Chattooga County Georgia's Emergency services.
Chattooga County is near the Georgia-Alabama border, not far from the epicenter.
According to a Web site affiliated with Georgia Institute of Technology, there appear to be two minor faults in northwest Georgia, the Cartersville and Rome faults; one that runs more or less along the Chattahoochee River, and two more in Central Georgia.
"It's not terribly unusual. The southeast Tennessee seismic zone which actually extends from that area up toward Knoxville is probably the second most active area in the Eastern United States," said Georgia Tech professor, Tim Long, who works in the university's earthquake monitoring lab.
"We have events like this about every 10 to 20 years," he said.
"So far they have not been serious. There's potential for a larger event," Long said.
"It was felt widely. These earthquakes in this area are typically deeper focus. That is they're down 20 to 30 kilometers in the earth's crust. So they're felt over a wide area but not as strongly as some other types of earthquakes," he said.
Long said the building code isn't as severe in the Southeast as it is on the West Coast. He says until around 10 to 15 years ago, there was not a statutory mandate to build to code, but that the buildings constructed since then should be safe.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/South/04/...mor/index.html
Earthquake in ATLANTA
It was pretty tame on my end, but a coworker who lives farther north said it really shook her house. It felt like about 10 Be Be kids were running through my house.
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