By Laura Legere
The Times Tribune
LACKAWANNA COUNTY, Pa. — An earthquake in Canada sent tremors throughout Northeast Pennsylvania on Wednesday, rocking buildings in downtown Scranton and sending worried workers out onto sidewalks.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the 5.0-magnitude quake struck at 1:41 p.m. and originated near the border of Quebec and Ontario about 35 miles from Ottawa. Tremors were also reported in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York, according to The Associated Press.
Dispatchers with the Lackawanna County Communications Center said the center was inundated with calls from people reporting tremors felt around central Scranton Wednesday afternoon. The shaking also was noticeable in the center’s building in Jessup.
People in downtown Scranton reported feeling tremors in the Lackawanna County Administration Building, the Scranton State Office Building and The Scranton Times Building, where workers evacuated the fifth floor after the radio tower atop the building began to shake.
Some workers fled the state office building when the shaking began, but the building wasn’t officially evacuated.
Gary Gifford, who works on the building’s fourth floor, felt the tremors.
“I thought someone was shaking my chair,” he said.
There was no damage reported in Lackawanna County, but the quake was suspected of causing or contributing to a crack in the Honesdale EMS building in Wayne County. The building was temporarily condemned and the ambulance company relocated, the Wayne County Communications Center said.
The vibrations also reached Wyoming County, where employees at the courthouse in Tunkhannock felt the ground shake.
“It shook here quite a bit. Even the shelves were shaking,” county clerk Bill Gaylord said.
“We really felt it. It was freaky,” said Marisa Crispell-Barber.
Ian Saginor, an assistant professor in Keystone College’s Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics who monitors the school’s seismometer, said the earthquake’s seismic waves reached Northeast Pennsylvania about a minute after it began.
The event was not long, he said, but may have felt longer for people in buildings that continued to sway after the seismic waves passed.
It originated in the Western Quebec Seismic Zone in the middle of a large tectonic plate, he said, not on the border of two plates, as in California, where earthquakes are often more severe. The quake probably was caused by a weakness in the earth’s crust.
“It’s why a 5.5 is a really big deal,” Dr. Saginor said, referring to the larger magnitude estimates released by the USGS soon after the quake. “You just don’t get much of that in this region.”
Seismic activity is not unusual in the Western Quebec zone, where 16 earthquakes between 1980 and 2000 had a 4.0 magnitude or larger, according to Natural Resources Canada.
Dr. Saginor said quakes in the Northeast resonate farther than those in the western United States, due to the hardness of the underlying rock in the region.
“If you were in California and as far away from a 5.5 earthquake as you were in Scranton, you probably wouldn’t have felt a thing,” he said.
According to The Associated Press:
The tremors, which lasted about 30 seconds, rattled buildings in Ottawa and Toronto, as well as government offices across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Quebec. No injuries or damage was reported.
The Parliament building in Ottawa was evacuated, with workers sent home while the building was inspected. Workers also left buildings in Toronto.
The quake came just ahead of the weekend summit of G-20 and G-8 world leaders in Toronto and Huntsville, Ontario.
Republished with permission from The Times Tribune