Thank goodness there were no injuries! We didnt get much damage in CT.
Rare Earthquake Rumbles State
Tremors Hit Hartford Early Saturday
April 21, 2002
By BARBARA NAGY, Courant Staff Writer
Hyacinth Ross thought she was dreaming when the shaking of her bed woke her just before 7 a.m. Saturday.
She opened her eyes. "Then it shook again," said Ross, who lives on Irving Street in Hartford. "I was thinking, `Something's under my bed.'"
But it was an earthquake - one of two or three that might be felt somewhere in Connecticut each year, geologists said Saturday. And there's a reason, they said, why people in Hartford and lower-lying towns in the western part of the state seemed to have felt the quake more than others.
The earth under Hartford tends to be clay, while the uplands to the west and east are bedrock, said Ralph Lewis, the state geologist.
"Bedrock doesn't amplify the shaking very much," said Ray Joesten, a geology professor at the University of Connecticut, "but looser sediments do."
Lewis, who was cutting trees in Hadlyme, said he didn't feel Saturday's quake at all. Neither did Joesten, who lives in Storrs.
The magnitude 5.1 temblor was centered 15 miles of southwest of Plattsburgh, N.Y., at 6:50 a.m. People from Cleveland to Baltimore and Maine felt the shaking, according to the National Earthquake Information Center.
There were reports of scattered damage in upstate New York, but none in Connecticut, said John Wiltse, director of the Connecticut office of emergency management.
In Connecticut, the quake apparently was felt mostly in the Hartford area and in some towns on the western edge of the state, judging by police reports. A Danbury dispatcher said police there got a couple of calls. Bristol got one.
"I didn't even know it happened," said a Naugatuck police official. At Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, the police dispatcher said the only call she got was from her nephew. State police in Bethany and Southbury logged several calls, as did Hartford-area departments.
Lewis said it's hard to pin down the cause of quakes in the Northeast. Temblors in places such as California are thought to be the result of pressure that builds up along known fault lines.
But quakes in this area generally aren't centered along faults at the surface of the Earth. Lewis said geologists suspect they occur deep underground - perhaps along faults that either don't extend to the surface or are angled so that they reach the surface far from where the quake was centered. He said it's also possible that New England and New York quakes are related to geologic activity in the North Atlantic.
That means that if there is a severe quake in Connecticut, damage probably won't be along fault lines but to structures built on certain soil types, such as filled wetlands and soft soil that are better conductors of energy, Lewis said.
According to the New England States Earthquake Consortium, the odds of a magnitude 5 quake being centered in New England in any one year are about one in 20, with a 90 percent probability of there being one within the next 50 years. The odds of a magnitude 6 quake are 1 in 300, or 30 percent within 50 years.
Boston College's Weston Observatory, New England's prime earthquake research center, calculates that on any given day there's a slightly greater than 10 percent chance of a quake being felt somewhere in the region.
There are patterns to the epicenters of Northeastern quakes, Joesten said. One cluster is in upstate New York, where Saturday's quake was centered.
Only a handful of temblors have had epicenters in Connecticut in the past 25 years.
Connecticut's quake activity has dropped to the point that there haven't been any reports of the "Moodus noises" - rumblings in the section of East Haddam thought to be caused by very small quakes and heard for centuries - since the 1980s, Lewis said.
"We don't really understand earthquakes all that well in New England because we're not a hotbed of earthquake country, if you know what I mean," Lewis said. There isn't a lot of money spent on studying quakes, he said, and there isn't a lot of instrumentation to gather data.
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